Spatial Effect Of Accelerating Population Increases Of Different Cities On Railway And Aviation Passenger Transport Distributions In China

With the development of regional economic integration of China,the transportation of China is under rapid construction.The railway passenger transport and aviation passenger transport are playing an important role in the medium-and-long-distance intercity transport.As one of the key elements of the social development,population also has strong impacts on the transportation industry.With the development of urbanization and the reform of the household registration system in China,more cross-regional migrations are generating,and the economic spatial pattern of China is and will continue to be reshaped.Therefore,it is necessary to study the spatial impacts of population factors on the railway and the aviation passenger transport distributions.In this research,15 cities located in different regions of China are selected as the studied cities.Spatial autoregressive models are established to explore the impacts of population increases of the cities in different regions of China on their spatially correlated intercity passenger transport volumes.Two spatial weight matrices are established to evaluate the correlations of the railway passenger transport volumes and the correlations of the aviation passenger transport volumes respectively.The spatial correlations of the variables are proved by the Moran’s I test.Then,the maximum likelihood estimation method is utilized to estimate the spatial autoregressive models.In view of the differences of transport infrastructure construction and economic development in each region of China,this research introduces the case study to analyze the spatial effects of the population growth rate of cities in different regions.Policy suggestions are put forward for the development of economy and transportation industry of different regions of China.The results show that the intercity passenger transport volumes are significantly improved by the increases of the population,the population growth rate and the science and technology expenditure.Spatial competitive relationships exist among the passenger volumes of both the railway and aviation transports.Also,the aviation passenger transport volumes are supported by the railway passenger transport volumes.The population growth rate increases of the cities in the Northwest China and Northeast China mainly improve the railway passenger transport volumes of the cities in local regions and North China.The population growth rate increase of a city in Central or Southeast China increases the railway passenger transport volumes of the cities in the north and southeast regions of China.Improving the population growth rate of a city in the north or southwest region of China mainly contributes to the railway passenger transport volume increases of the cities in the same region.This paper contains 22 figures,12 tables and 61 references.