Investigating Intercity Rail Transit Scope with Social Economy Accessibility: Case Study of the Pearl River Delta Region in China

Abstract

In response to challenges caused by high gasoline prices, traffic congestion, and greenhouse gas emissions, smart internment on intercity rail transit infrastructures and service suggests a rekindling of many countries’ interest in offering a range of benefits over automobile travels. In order to check the suitability of the proposed intercity rail transit system with the local conditions in a region, models for relating the intercity rail transit scope and social economy factors have been developed with the datasets obtained in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region in Guangdong Province, China. In this paper, the accessibility-based approach is presented to explore the impact of the intercity rail transit system planning on the regional development. The impact of three typical accessibility variables, transportation, population, and economic accessibilities, are considered in the approach. The global rail transit scope planning models are developed by using the regression technique to correlate the lengths of 254 regional intercity rail transit systems in different countries in the world with social economy factors. Those models are used for estimating the intercity rail transit size for the PRD region. The modeled transit scopes are examined with spatial distributions of the defined three accessibilities at each node (or centroid center of a town) in a Geographic Information System environment. The developed method has been proven helpful to understanding the gap between transport supply and potential travel demand and the suitability of each node to alignment of each rail transit route through the PRD region case study.

Keywords

Intercity rail transit / Population accessibility / Economy accessibility / Transportation accessibility / Social economic factors

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Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China(#41171139)