Expressways And The Evolution Of Urban Spatial Structure In China

In the past 30 years,China's highway construction started early and developed rapidly.Since the implementation of the "five vertical and seven horizontal" national main road project in 1992,especially the implementation of the "7918" national highway network project in 2004,China has built the world's largest highway network with open mileage.At the same time,compared with the rapid development of expressway,China's cities have also entered a new stage of development.At present,the form of social and economic transformation is becoming increasingly prominent,and the rapid urbanization process has become an important feature of economic and social transformation.However,whether the expressway will promote the evolution of urban spatial structure from single center to multi-center has not been fully verified by scholars.In view of this,this paper uses the national highway data from 2000 to2010,combined with the single center or multi-center urban spatial structure measurement index to investigate the impact of highway opening on the evolution of urban spatial structure,and further analyzes the trend and mechanism of the impact of expressway on urban spatial structure,which is of great significance to the theoretical study of expressway and urban spatial structure.In this paper,the development of single-center urban spatial structure and multi-center urban spatial structure and the influence of traffic on urban spatial structure are reviewed.Then,using the Arcgis to map the national highway construction in 2000,2005 and 2010,and to construct the urban spatial structure measurement indicators for 2000,2005 and 2010 through land use remote sensing data andTMLandscan population grid data,such as monocentric(single-center index),Hufindal index),and using monocentric(single-center index)to map the national urban spatial structure distribution map for 2000,2005 and 2010,and to find the developed areas of highway construction in China,In the area east of Heihe-Tengchong line,the urban spatial structure is more inclined to the multi-center spatial structure,and from the process of urban spatial structure evolution,we find that the number of prefecture-level cities from single-center urban spatial structure to multi-center urban spatial structure is more than that from multi-center urban spatial structure to single-center urban spatial structure.This paper discusses the influence mechanism of expressway on the evolution of urban spatial structure from three aspects: land use,industrial agglomeration andpopulation distribution.After that,we construct the basic regression model and analyze the regression result of fixed effect by Hausman test.The empirical results show that the opening of expressway significantly affects the evolution of urban spatial structure in prefecture-level cities.Based on the use of only monocentric(single-center index)to measure urban spatial structure,deviations are likely to occur.hence,this paper adopts the method of replacing the index to measure the multicenter index,replacing the single center index monocentric(single center index)as the explained variable to the herfindal index to test the robustness of the results.the results show that the basic regression results are robust.In addition,this paper will explain whether the core variable highway opened to replace the number of urban highways opened in different years to test the robustness.At the same time,the influence of expressway on the evolution of urban spatial structure is heterogeneous.On the one hand,the expressway has significant influence on the urban spatial structure of the eastern and western regions,but not on the urban spatial structure of the central region.On the other hand,for different administrative levels of cities,the opening of highways to the urban spatial structure of the impact is also different.According to the results of intermediary effect analysis,the impact of highway opening on land use and industrial agglomeration in the region is more significant,but not on population distribution,indicating that expressway may affect urban spatial structure more than population distribution by attracting capital factor inflow and accelerating land development and utilization.Overall,the impact of highways on the evolution of urban spatial structure is long-term and profound.First,The policy suggestion of this paper is to strengthen the support to the backward areas,to ensure the connection between the backward areas and the national highways and important cities;secondly,to focus on covering the areas with large population,to strengthen the network construction and road widening construction of the highways in such areas;and the government can reasonably guide the elements and industrial distribution,while promoting industrial upgrading,to optimize the spatial distribution of economic activities and to promote the coordinated development of urban centers.