The Impact Analysis of High Speed Railway on City Accessibility in Henan Province

Accessibility level is an important indicator to measure the perfect degree of traffic network, *-shaped high-speed railway network in Henan province, forming in the next 10 years, will have significant impacts on the accessibility spatial distribution pattern. In the paper, those impact and the evolution patterns, in 2010, 2016, 2020 and 2025, were analyzed by using the time distance between cities and population weighted travel time inverse as accessibility indexes. The results show that the construction and improvement of high speed railway traffic network, will effectively improve the links among cities, shorten the distance between them, result an obvious space convergence effect. By 2025, as ZhengJi and ZhengTai high speed railways opening to traffic, one hour of high speed railway living area with Zhengzhou as the center will have been formed in the province. City accessibility indexes exhibit center-edge characteristics, the accessibility levels of cities in central region are significantly higher than that of cities in marginal region. Different high speed railway lines have significant differences on the promotion of province accessibility levels, ZhengTai and ZhengJi high speed railway lines have the largest contribution rate per 100km, followed by JingGuang and XuLan lines, ZhengWan and ZhengHe lines. The province accessibility contours gradually show slender spindle distribution characteristics with Zhengzhou as center, JingGuang and XuLan high speed railway lines as major and minor axes respectively, contour curves tend to be smooth and uniform. The province accessibility will have been optimizing, and the distribution of railway network will have been becoming space equalization.