PATTERN OF ACCESSIBILITY IMPROVEMENT BY HIGH-SPEED RAILWAYS IN CHINA

This paper examines the geographical impacts brought by the newly constructed high-speed railways (HSR) in China. Two major issues will be discussed: 1) proper methodologies to be considered for measuring the HSR accessibility, 2) the results (geographical pattern) of HSR accessibility and its meaning. Accessibility has been defined in a variety of ways and measuring accessibility patterns of HSR in other parts of the world are not uncommon. In our study, we argue that the improvement of accessibility by HSR varies by 1) the connection and time-savings between the city-pairs concerning HSR users, 2) their accessibility to the HSR station at origin city from trip starting point and 3) their accessibility from the HSR station at destination city to the ending point of the trip. This three-part accessibility measure was applied to two newly constructed HSR lines in the Yangtze River Delta region, and the results show a significant contribution of intra-city accessibility to HSR stations, among other factors.