Accessibility Impacts of China's High-Speed Rail Network

With the large-scale implementation of high-speed rail (HSR) network, China has entered in a new era featuring high-speed rail transportation. The launching of this new transportation infrastructure not only offers a new option for travelers' mode choice, but also influences, or even generates, the redistribution of demographic and economic activities. As has been observed over the past several years, the impact of HSR is huge. However, few quantitative studies have been conducted to measure this impact. This paper conducts an accessibility analysis to evaluate the impacts of China's HSR network. Weighted average travel times and travel costs, contour measure, and potential accessibility are used as indicators of accessibility at the macroscopic level. Forty-nine major cities in the HSR network are chosen for the accessibility analysis. Accessibility quantification and spatial distribution analysis for the study cities are performed on the Geographical Information System (GIS) platform. Accessibility associated with varying availability of HSR, conventional rail, and airline are estimated and compared. The selected indicators and computational methods are found effective in evaluating the accessibility impacts of HSR from different conceptualizations and perspectives, and also offer complementary information on accessibility capacity for the study cities via HSR network.