The Research On The Consistency Between The High Speed Railway Constructi And The Travel Demand Of The Public

Since1990s, China started the careful consideration on development of the highspeed railway engineering. From2003, this country quickly established the world’sNo.1high speed railway network in terms of scale. Yet, while achieving thegreat-leap-forward development, China’s high speed railway engineering stillencountered several problems like safety of operation, burden of funded debt and lowerattendance. The7.23Wen Zhou Railway Accident witnessed the arousal of theskepticism and questions of the public and scholars against the high speed railwayengineering. Hence, the problem awaiting for solutions is that what is the properestspeed and scale of the high speed railway engineering construction and whether China’shigh speed railway construction is indeed targeting at the travel demand of the public ornot.This research employed the literature review and survey as the researchmethodology in order to investigate the consistency between the construction of highspeed railway and the demand of the public, which suggested that the high speedrailway construction failed to meet the travel demand of the public. Compared withother countries, China’s high speed railway construction is characterized as speedy,large-scale, widely-covered and with poor economic basis. The origin of these featuresexactly came down to too many political connotations the construction engineeringembraced. It is fair to say that the rapid establishment of the high speed railway is not aproduct of the carefully considered solution to the travel demand of the public. From anational perspective, the speed and scale of the high speed railway engineering is thepride of the government, which can show off the strength of China. From theperspective of local governments, the construction of high speed railway engineeringbecame the leverage for them to achieve certain political performance and get access toeconomic benefits. Hence, the high speed railway construction is indeed conductedwithout a significant reason, which contributed to springing up of a plenty of thelarge-scale high speed railway engineering that are constructed speedily but also blindly.Therefore, the high speed railway engineering, as a public infrastructure work that failsto address the demand of the public, is indeed facing the dilemma. On one hand, thegreat-leap-forward development of the high speed railway engineering does not showup the expected social benefits. Conversely, it wastes a great deal of public resources.On the other hand, the construction engineering results in the unfair distribution ofpublic resources as it offers the alternative traveling way for the middle-andupper-class,while squeezing the possibility of the lower class to use the publictransportation who are, eventually, placed in the position that they have to choose between the option of high speed railway or the inconvenient transportation option inwhich they have to travel to a interchange city for their final destination.