Accessibility Of Chinese Provincial Capitals Based On The Presence Of High-speed Rails

Innovations in science and technology have led to a new high-speed transport infrastructure. High–speed rail, for example, is improving regional accessibility through time-space compression, and is promoting changes in regional economic patterns and spatial structures. In launching a “four vertical and four horizontal” passenger dedicated rail line, China fully entered the age of high-speed rail. This emergence highlights the importance of understanding the impact of high-speed rail on Chinese city accessibility. Using traffic times between provincial capitals, train trip prices derived from train schedule, this study explored the impact of high-speed rail on temporal and economic accessibility respectively from two important perspectives: travel time and travel expenses.There were several key findings.(1) Temporal accessibility of provincial capitals is closely related to the spatial location and external traffic condition of the cities. What's more, construction scheduling and regional disequilibrium of high-speed rail directly results that improvement degree of temporal accessibility tends to reduce gradient.(2) It is significant that high-speed rail would affect the daily communication areas of provincial capitals on their direction and quantity. Meanwhile, the spatial location of provincial capitals and geographic barriers would affect the expansion of daily communication areas by influencing HSR lines.(3) Operating high-speed rail increases rail service prices to provincial capitals in different degrees. For example, rail prices increased from 6 to 60 yuan(RMB) for the 9 cities without high-speed rails. In contrast, rail prices increased more than 60 yuan, and as high as 300 yuan, for the 22 cities with high-speed rails. HSR service price tends to “hierarchy” with the joint effect of cost in per kilometer, connectivity and spatial location of the city.(4) When considering resident capacities to consume rail service, the research concludes that urban resident income plays a decisive role in determining consumption capacity. Meanwhile, rail service prices are crucial in determining urban consumption capacity with respect to the rank of consumption capacity. HSR has weakened resident consumption capacity in HSR service with the decreasing frequency.(5) In terms of temporal accessibility, high-speed rail enlarge inequalities across “all cities” and “cities with HSR”. Besides, high-speed rail reduces inequalities across all cities in terms of rail service price and consumption capacity, but expands inequalities for 22 cities with high-speed rail. In addition, the inequality of rail service consumption capacity is far higher than rail service price.