Page 366 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Yang, Haoran. Dobruszkes, Frédéric. Wang, Jiao’e. Dijst, Martin.

1. Introduction

Urban systems are made up of city nodes and of various kind of (social, economic and political)
interactions that materialize to some extent through transportation and information flows (Meijers
2005; Devriendt et al. 2010). Even though Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
overwhelmingly facilitates instant communication, face to face interactions are still important in
the contemporary world (Bertolini and Dijst, 2003). High-speed physical transportations such as
airlines and high-speed railways (HSR) which can dramatically decrease geographic and temporal
constraints of moving people for business transactions, tourism, post-migratory travels for keeping
social links with friends and relatives, academic collaborations and political activities, are still
crucial for facilitating the formation of functional urban systems (Hall and Pain, 2006).
Seen the important role of high-speed transportation networks on linking urban areas, the
development of airlines and HSR has been supported with substantial capital and infrastructure
investments in China to stimulate integration of the national urban network (Ng and Wang, 2012)
and its future integration with Euro-Asian urban systems by the Belt and Road Initiatives (Chen
and Zhang, 2015). Regarding airline transportation networks, China’s ranking in scheduled seats
was merely 37th in the world in 1978, but rose to 2nd after 2005. The number of airports (civil
certificated schedule airport) in mainland China increased from 94 in 1990 to 216 in 2016, and
is expected to reach 260 in 2020 according to the 13th five-year plan of China’s contemporary
and comprehensive transportation system (Fu et al., 2012; NDRC, 2016). Although entering the
transportation market at a later stage in 2003, Chinese HSR networks (Figure 1) have become the
largest in the world and are even growing faster than airline networks, even though HSR length
per capita is less spectacular (Delaplace and Dobruszkes, 2016). Until to the end of 2015, Chinese
HSR networks have reached a total of 19,000km accounting for over 60% of the global level, and
can cover more than 70% of the population and 80% of the GDP (Wang et al., 2015; NDRC, 2016).

Figure 1 The HSR planning in China until 2020 (made by authors)

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