Mega Region, High Speed Rail and Urban Reconfiguration

Among the most powerful forces shaping China’s urban transition is a new High-Speed Rail (HSR) network, an ongoing investment project that dramatically improves inter-urban accessibility. HSR will spur the creation of multinucleated urban mega regions.

Although project-level studies of HSR have been conducted to justify investment costs, no integrated spatial and economic studies of HSR have analyzed the network’s local, regional, and country-level impacts on population distribution, economic activities, and land use and price. This has left key questions about the HSR-influenced urban development process unanswered. What are the nature, magnitude, and spatial distribution of HSR’s wider economic impacts? Are these benefits generative, redistributive, or both? What is the direction of redistribution: convergent, distributing resources more equally to all cities, or divergent, distributing resources more towards existing growth poles? To what degree does HSR stimulate urban land development, and how does this affect the real estate market? This project addresses these knowledge gaps with a three-part investigation of HSR’s new patterns of accessibility, its wider economic benefits, and its effects on land and real estate development. Case studies of HSR corridors will be used to compare these effects in cities that vary by size, economic structure, and HSR connectivity.

 

Capacity Constrained Accessibility of High-Speed Rail, Yu Shen, and Jinhua Zhao , Transportation, p.1–28, (2015)

This paper proposes an enhanced measure of accessibility that explicitly considers circumstances in which the capacity of the transport infrastructure is limited. Under these circumstances, passengers may suffer longer waiting times, resulting in the delay or cancellation of trips. Without considering capacity constraints, the standard measure overestimates the accessibility contribution of transport infrastructure. We estimate the expected waiting time and the probability of forgoing trips...

Cross-City Comparison: Impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail on Population Growth, Yu Shen, Jinhua Zhao, João de Abreu e Silva, and Luis Miguel Martínez , 95th Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, 08/2015, Washington, D.C., (2016)

This paper studies and compares the impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail (HSR) on population growth in the five cities served by this line—Madrid, Ciudad Real, Puertollano, Córdoba, and Seville. The analysis period ranges from 1990 to 2006. The comparative analysis finds that the impacts of HSR largely differ. The association between the opening of HSR and population growth in Ciudad Real is observable; but the relationship is not clear in other station inner buffer areas. To study the...

Agglomeration and Diversification: Bi-Level Analysis of 15-Years' Impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail, Yu Shen, João de Abreu e Silva, Jinhua Zhao, and Luis Miguel Martínez , Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., (2015)

This paper studies the impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail (HSR) on population growth and land cover change in the five HSR connected cities - Madrid, Ciudad Real, Puertollano, Cordoba, and Seville - at both regional and local level. The analysis period ranges from 1991 to 2006. The study finds that, at regional level, the population growth and land development process concentrate mostly towards the two largest cities, Madrid and Seville, while other smaller HSR served cities are also...

From accessibility improvement to land development: a comparative study on the impacts of Madrid-Seville high-speed rail, Yu Shen, Jinhua Zhao, João de Abreu e Silva, and Luis Miguel Martínez , 16 Feb, 2017, (2017)

This paper studies the impacts of Madrid-Seville High-Speed Rail (HSR) on land-cover change in the five HSR connected cities – Madrid, Ciudad Real, Puertollano, Cordoba, and Seville. The analysis period ranges from 1991 to 2006. The study finds that, in the Madrid-Seville region, the land development process concentrates mostly toward the two largest cities, Madrid and Seville, while other smaller HSR served cities are also benefited. The process of land development in each city varies...

People

Yu Shen's picture
Assistant Professor at Tongji Univ.
Jinhua Zhao's picture
Professor of Cities and Transportation