Page 377 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

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

As to the third class, HSR networks start to cover largely the inter-regional connections between
capital cities within their respective regions such as Beijing-Nanjing and Guangzhou-Wuhan,
while airline networks start to connect the national capital cities with high socio-economic
performance and other regional capital cities with relatively low socio-economic performance
such as the link Beijing-Urumchi, and further provide connection services between major and
tourism cities within specific regions such as the link Kunming-Xishuangbanna in Yunan province.
With regard to the fourth class, there are 219 links accounting for 14.9% of the total links in
HSR networks in which the interactions between the middle and the east have increased to a
large extent by HSR travel. Meanwhile, there are 155 links accounting for 16.9% of the total
links in airline networks in which interactions between the west, the middle and the east parts
of China have increased; the connections to cities in Xinjiang, Yunnan and Xizang provinces are
only covered by airline networks. In the fifth (non-dominant) class, the airline connections have
already covered the whole parts of China but with weaker intra-connections in the west than
the middle and east, whereas the HSR connections still only cover the middle and east parts of
China. This is likely a typical reflection of the core-periphery urban system in China where cities
where cities in the middle and west are much reliable on the functional interactions with cities
in the east by HSR and airline travel, respectively.

Figure 6. The comparison between HSR and airline advantage links.

We further identified the HSR and airline advantage links by comparing the differences of link
strength values (RSL) between the HSR and airline network among 144 HSR-Airline city links.
If one link’s RSL value of HSR networks is larger than that of airline network, it is considered
as a HSR advantage link or otherwise an airline advantage link in Figure 6. The associations
between the two networks by the values of link strength and related rankings are statistically
non-significant: Pearson's correlation coefficient is 0.167 (p > 0.01), and Spearman's rho is 0.123
(p > 0.01). This means that a city link with both HSR and airline connections, which is dominant
in one transportation network, will be not dominant in another one. In Figure 8, it clearly shows
that HSR advantage links normally connect the major cities with large populations and GDP in
the specific region with a short travel distance. In contrast, airline advantage links connect the
major cities with large populations and GDPs in different regions with a long travel distance.
For example, both Chongqing-Chengdu and Shanghai-Nanjing were downgraded from the first

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