Page 376 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

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

4.1.2 Link strength

Figure 5. The geographical distribution of HSR and airline links.

Figure 5 shows the five classes of links in the HSR and airline networks. Regarding the first
class, only the link Beijing-Shanghai connecting the Bohai Rim and the YRD region is in airline
networks, while the links Guangzhou-Shenzhen in Guangdong province, Hangzhou-Shanghai,
Suzhou-Shanghai, and NanjingShanghai in the YRD region, and Chengdu-Chongqing in the south-
west are in HSR networks. It can be found that city ends in the first class are all national or
regional socio-econoimic cores with quite high GDPs and populations. However, airline networks
facilitated the interregional interaction between the national economic cores such as Beijing
and Shanghai with a long geographical distance (1,092 km). In contrast HSR networks facilitate
the regional interactions between regional economic cores with an average short distance (178
km), which can be understood as a consequence of the dense urban network in Eastern China.
This typically reflects the primarily dominant position of each type of network for the inter-city
connection at the national or regional scale, respectively.
In terms of the second class, besides to a few interregional links such as Beijing-Shanghai,
GuangzhouChangsha and Beijing-Shenyang whose city ends are economic cores in different
regions, there are more regional connections in HSR networks such as the links connecting
Beijing to Shijiazhuang, Jinan and Taiyuan in the Bohai Rim and Shanghai to Wuxi and Changzhou
in the YRD region; meanwhile, there are still only interregional connections for long distance
travel in airline networks such as the links connecting Beijing to Guangzhou, Shenzhen and
Chengdu, and the links connecting Shanghai to Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The Beijing-Shanghai
link in the second class of HSR networks reflects that for interregional travel within a certain
distance, HSR connections can compete with airline connections for the major city links.

374 360.revista de alta velocidad