Study On China's Transportation Under The Background Of Urbanization

China's urbanization process moved faster since the year 2000 and maintained a rapid development speed ever after. During seven years time, urbanization rate of China has developed from 36.2% in 2000 to 45.4% in 2007 and will continue to grow and finally exceed 60% in 2020. This paper is devoted to explore the transportation industry under the background of China's urbanization and its trends in the future, as well as the issues to be considered in governmental planning.Urbanization lays 2 major impacts on passenger transport, facilitating population migration and upgrading consumer price level. In addition, the upgrading consumer price level boosts the increase of travel demand.Urbanization's influence on freight transport is accompanied by industrialization and driven by upgrading of industrial structure and transfer of regional distribution of industries. Heavy industry is the major driving force of future increase of freight transport demand. Trade development resulted from transfer of regional distribution of industries also increases the demand of freight transport.In summary, transportation system is closely related to urbanization. The past five years have witnessed the fastest growth rate of transportation volume that has ever been achieved in our history. However, the transport infrastructure construction failed to maintain balanced development in supply and demand. Though transport infrastructure investment takes a large GDP share, the capital distribution lacks rationality. In recent decade, the compound growth rate of highway has reached 18.6%, and efficiency in the supply and demand of highway has been fully achieved. At the same time, compound growth rate of railway is only 1.9%; therefore creates a conflict between the declining share of railway transport and the increasing public demand for it. For years, China's railway is operated under low electrification level, however, ranked 1st place in the world in its transport capacity, which situation emphasizes the severe lagging status of railway infrastructure construction.We expect the transport volume to continuously increase in the future years, though with a slowed growth rate in long-term. Our suggestion to the government is to invest more to the transportation infrastructure construction, reduce social transportation cost, fully explore the advantages of each transport methods, and take all factors into consideration, such as energy, environment protection, and land resource. We believe that upgrading quality while controlling the total quantity is the future development trend of transportation industry of China, which requires optimizing the efficiency of general transportation system and also facilitates performance of general transportation system and finally contributes to the smooth operation of domestic economic system and reduction of total social cost.