Page 375 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

The configurations of Chinese national urban systems in both high-speed railway and airline networks

In terms of airline advantage cities, except to Sanya and Haikou which are tourism cities
in Hainan province , they are the major cities with high socio-economic performance and
5
administrative levels mainly in the east and a few in the west. Among them, although there
exist large differences between the city strength values in two transportation networks,
Shanghai, Xiamen, Dalian, Changsha and Hangzhou did not have the class change. They are
typical transport hub cities in specific regions with well-connected both HSR and airline
networks, functionally interacting not only with distant cities far away but also adjacent
cities within the regions to a certain extent. Therefore, in this case, although those cities
are in the same class of both networks, their city strength is larger in airline networks than
HSR networks because of some inbound airline passengers (or outbound airline passengers)
transiting to/from other cities by HSR within the specific regions. For instance, despite
some operational and administrative obstacles for the airline-HSR integration in Shanghai’s
Hongqiao Terminal (the best integrated transport hub in China), there are still a large
amount of airline passengers transferring in Shanghai by HSR to adjacent cities in the
YRD region (Givoni and Chen, 2017). This is also confirmed by aforementioned three HSR
advantage cities within less than one hour HSR travel time with Shanghai. Different from
those airline advantage cities without the class change, Beijing was upgraded from the
second class of HSR networks to the first class of airline networks; Guangzhou and Shenzhen
as the other two southern economic cores in Guangdong province were upgraded from the
second and third class of HSR networks up to the first and second class of airline networks,
respectively.
As mentioned before, due to its geographical location in the north with a larger average
distance to other cities, being a national capital with the most airline connections, Beijing
still heavily relies on the airline network for the interaction with other distant cities,
which is also the case for Guangzhou and Shenzhen in the south. Chengdu and Chongqing
in the south-west were upgraded from the third dominant class of HSR cities to the second
dominant class of airline cities. However, different from the cases of Beijing, Guangzhou
and Shenzhen, the weaker roles of Chengdu and Chongqing with fewer than three HSR
connections to other cities are mainly a result of the uncompleted HSR construction between
the middle and the west. Thus, their functional interactions with cities in the middle and
even further to the east could be only facilitated by air networks.
Interestingly, Haikou and Sanya in Hainan province, and Harbin, and Tianjin in the north
increase from the non-dominant class of HSR networks to the third dominant class of airline
networks and Xi’an from the non-dominant class of HSR networks even to the second class
of airline networks. Typically, Sanya and Haikou as two tourism cities in Hainan province are
only served by the Sanya-Haikou HSR route; therefore, due to their isolated geographical
locations in an island without direct ground transportation connections to the mainland
of China, they have to resort to the airline transportation for carrying passengers to/from
Hainan province, especially for leisure travel.
It is surprising that Tianjin as a municipality-level city, and Haerbin and Xi’an as sub-
provincial and regional capital cities with large GDP and populations, are only dominant
in airline rather than HSR networks. It could be that their regional integrations with
adjacent cities are not as good as their interregional integrations with distant cities, which
is reflected by both types of passenger flows from demand side. For instance, Tianjin’s
economic structures are less cooperative with other adjacent cities in the Bohai Rim (Yang,
et al 2017). Therefore, it has to resort to the airline travel instead of HSR travel for the
economic cooperation with other distant cities out of the Bohai Rim.

5 Hainan province is an island separated from Mainland China by the Qiongzhou Strait with an average 30km width.

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 373