Research On Urban Rail Transit From The View Of Transport Network Form Stratifying

With the economic and social development, the construction process of Urban Rail Transit (URT) in China is gradually speeding up, for the reason that URT can solve the traffic congestion problem well caused by urbanization. However, during the process of developing from the single-line phase to multi-line phase or network development phase, the government will face a huge investment gap or a heavy burden of financial subsidies. Therefore, the government chooses which way to introduce market forces and resources, the distribution of the authority and responsibility between them become particularly important problem. This problem affects whether the product of URT could remain the nature of public welfare and financial sustainability.This article firstly combs the situation of the world's major cities' URT, including investment, construction and operating conditions, while finding that they mostly share the two common problems:lack of construction funds and operating losses. However, we could not find reasons from the government or enterprises alone, since URT is a kind of quasi public goods. As URT possess the quality of the network morphology, consisting of physical network, technology network, service network and related enterprises with the policy network. So this paper introduces the Transport Network Form Stratified (TNFS) analysis frame of URT creatively. The (TNFS) frame classifies the URT's network into four layers:policy and institutional level, corporate and organizational level, equipment and service level and rail track level. This framework emphasizes the interaction between the main layers, which coincides with the governance of URT committing to research the power dependence between the main bodies. The governance of URT is a portion of public affairs governance, which involves multiple governance bodies. The relationship between the government and the URT companies is the core relationship in the progress of governance. Summarizing the experiences from the major cities, there are two paths for the formation of the core relationship:creating the public enterprises by legislation and public contracts. This paper does not only discuss the characteristics, the resource constraints and specific operation of the two methods, but also analyzes the governance practice of URT in Beijing.Finally, it comes to the conclusion after theoretical and empirical analysis:In the different stages and under different resource constraints for the development of URT, the government could create public enterprise by legislation or sign public contracts to establish the core relationship with the enterprises in URT; whatever path the government chooses, the formation of the core relationship lies in whether the government builds an enterprise with unified power and responsibility according to the actual situation.