The Impacts of High-Speed Rail on Regional Accessibility and Spatial Development—Updated Evidence from China’s Mid-Yangtze River City-Cluster Region

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Very interesting article. However the authors can improve some aspects.

• Section 2.3 and references. There are some articles published about territorial impacts or economic development in Spain produced by HSR services with analysis based in trend population grown before-after start HSR serveces. I thing authors you  can improve the article considering these references.
• Section 3.2.
  • Travel times and accessibility are geografic caracteristics that not describes mobility. Mobility consider number of passangers. To explain this difference is important. In fact, you can have an HSR station with a very  significant travel time improvement but without passangers.
  • In accesibility formula, the value of parameter 'alfa' is 1. I think this decision need more explanation. Note you that travel time minor of 1,5 hours, aproximatly, allows commuters and, consequently, important changes in the sistem of cities. The decision implies a very hard simplification of reality that can be to justifie futurs studies.
  • On the other hand, it is necessary to define the concept of 'economic linkage' and to explain what data or indicator have been used to calculate it.
• In general: please map corridors. Note your that readers around the world not necessarily know they location in China. The same suggestion is valid for top-bottom cities in tables.
• Section 5. The same suggestion about the use of 'mobility' concept vs travel time indicator.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

Very interesting article. However the authors can improve some aspects.

• Section 2.3 and references. There are some articles published about territorial impacts or economic development in Spain produced by HSR services with analysis based in trend population grown before-after start HSR serveces. I thing authors you  can improve the article considering these references.

 

Response: Thank you for the suggestion! We have updatedthe literature review section, including two specific studies on the long term effects of HSR services on population and territorial cohesion in Spain:

Monzon, Andres, Elena Lopez, and Emilio Ortega. "Has Hsr Improved Territorial Cohesion in Spain? An Accessibility Analysis of the First 25 Years: 1990–2015." European Planning Studies 27, no. 3 (2019): 513-32.

Coronado, José M, José M de Ureña, and José Luis Miralles. "Short-and Long-Term Population and Project Implications of High-Speed Rail for Served Cities: Analysis of All Served Spanish Cities and Re-Evaluation of Ciudad Real and Puertollano." European Planning Studies 27, no. 3 (2019): 434-60.

 

• Section 3.2.

Travel times and accessibility are geograficcaracteristics that not describes mobility. Mobility consider number of passangers. To explain this difference is important. In fact, you can have an HSR station with a very  significant travel time improvement but without passangers.

 

Response: Thank you for the note! We accordingly deleted the term “mobility” and used instead “travel time”.

 

• In accesibility formula, the value of parameter 'alfa' is 1. I think this decision need more explanation. Note you that travel time minor of 1,5 hours, aproximatly, allows commuters and, consequently, important changes in the sistem of cities. The decision implies a very hard simplification of reality that can be to justifiefuturs studies.

 

Response: Identifying the value of alpha for accessibility modeling indeed was an empirical challenge. We provide the following narrative to explain the use of value 1 (Lines 228-233 in the text).

The parameter value of areflects people’s sensitivity to increase in travel time, cost, or generalized price. It is usually obtained from local travel surveys. Unfortunately, inter-city travel surveys in MYRCCR were not available when this study was carried out (and are still unavailable as of today). This study took the value of 1, which was used by The World Bank [4] in its study of China’s HSR and also by other studies on accessibility modeling[49].

 

• On the other hand, it is necessary to define the concept of 'economic linkage' and to explain what data or indicator have been used to calculate it.

 

Response:Thank you for the suggestion! We added explanations to this concept and its measurement and added related references. See text in Lines 248-253, also copied below for your easy reference:

 

3.2.4 Economic linkage

To assess the strength and the changing pattern of economic linkage between MYRCCR cities, we applied the gravity model type of measure that has been used widely in other studies [43, 44], as shown below:

Where Pi and Pjrepresent the population of cities i and j, respectively; and  represent the income of citiesi and j, respectively; is the shortest travel time from city i to j; represents the economic linkage intensity between the two cities; Li represents the total economic linkage of city i with the rest of MYRCCR. The data on population and income of MYRCCR cities needed for calculating economic linkage came from the provincial statistics books in 2006 and 2014.

 

• In general: please map corridors. Note your that readers around the world not necessarily know they location in China. The same suggestion is valid for top-bottom cities in tables.

 

Response: Great suggestion! We added Figure 1, which shows China’s rail network (HSR and conventional) and the location of our study region in the country.

Figure 1. High-Speed Rail Network and theLocation MYRCCR in China

 

• Section 5. The same suggestion about the use of 'mobility' concept vs travel time indicator.

 

Response: Revised, as noted above.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to say that this is an interesting emprical study with finer scales of data. This paper tries to analyze the unbalanced impacts brought about by high speed rail. Therefore, it has the value to be published. However, there are some concerns for the authors to properly address.

First, some information in the article should be clarified. For example, by the end of 2020, the high speed rail length in operation reached 37900 kms.  It is safe to say the plan of 38,000 kms will be achieved and surpassed. On page 4, the average operating speed of conventional rail is about 100km/h, G-headed HSR is 350km/h, and the speed of D- and C-headed HSR is 160-200km/h. I think the authors confused the operation speed with technical speed. The average operation speed will be lower if the stops are taken into consideration. How the paper calculates the travel time and accessibility will generate different results and implications.

Second, there are rich exant studies related to this article, including but not limited to:

Li H , Strauss J , Shunxiang H , et al. Do high-speed railways lead to urban economic growth in China? A panel data study of China's cities[J]. Social Science Electronic Publishing, 2017, 69(AUG.):70-89.

B S L A , B Y W , C A Z . Does China's high-speed rail development lead to regional disparities? A network perspective[J]. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2020, 138:299-321.

It should be noted that besides travel time, accessibility, CV, and economic linkage, the generalized accessibility which takes time, price and even frenquecncy into consideration is widely used in the related studies. Therefore, this paper should cite those papers and state its limitations of its research.

Third, some statements in the article should have citations or clarifications: (1) On page 4, the map should illustrate not only the sample prefectural cities, but also its position in China for the readers who don't quite familiar with the location of the cities in your research.

(2) On page 4, for accessibility, why you use population as the weigh rather the economic index or the population and GDP combined index?

(3) On page 5, according to the flow space theory, where does this term come from?

(4) On page 11, why subway, car and even bicycle transportation modes are emphasized? Since for this research, we need to focus in inter-city or inter-regional transportation modes.

Last, the English is readable and easy to be understood. However, there are some expressions which are very difficult to understand. For example:

On page 2, "Existing studies are limited in terms of data that either came from a single time point or looked at only one scale of prefecture“, this statement is not correct.

On page 11, "Second, we should give full play to the dislocation development mode of charateristic resources." I cannot understand what it means.

 

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

I would like to say that this is an interesting emprical study with finer scales of data. This paper tries to analyze the unbalanced impacts brought about by high speed rail. Therefore, it has the value to be published. However, there are some concerns for the authors to properly address.

First, some information in the article should be clarified. For example, by the end of 2020, the high speed rail length in operation reached 37900 kms.  It is safe to say the plan of 38,000 kms will be achieved and surpassed. On page 4, the average operating speed of conventional rail is about 100km/h, G-headed HSR is 350km/h, and the speed of D- and C-headed HSR is 160-200km/h. I think the authors confused the operation speed with technical speed. The average operation speed will be lower if the stops are taken into consideration. How the paper calculates the travel time and accessibility will generate different results and implications.

Response: Thank you for the comment! We re-wrote the sections and introduced the operating characteristics of D-headed HSR and G-headed HSR in the context. We used published train timetables to derive city-to-city times. HSR operations are in most cases very reliable and on time. Stop times were taken into consideration separately, as shown in the train timetables. We agree with the reviewer that some inaccuracies still exist in our time estimates, for example, the estimates of access times, the times by conventional trains (not as reliable as HSR trains). Since our analysis interests focused more on the changes in times and accessibility from 2006 to 2014 than on the precision of time estimates per se, we assessed that the inaccuracy introduced in the speed calculation was acceptable.

Below please find the text for your easy reference.

 

(Lines 187-209 in manuscript)

We chose the year of 2006 as the beginningpoint of the study’s timeframe considering the history of China’s HSR planning and investments. China Ministry of Railway announced the first national HSR plan in 2004 [47]. Implementing the plan relied predominately onthe national transportation budget, which comes in afive-year cycle known as the national Five-Year Plan. 2006 was the commencing year of China’s 11th Five-Year Planfrom which HSR development received the first wave of major investments. Before 2006, China’s rail operations went through five rounds of upgrading, elevating the speed limits on the conventional tracks.Resulting from the upgrades, the fast trains, coded as D-trains, run at the cruise speed of 200 km/h. The final, seventh round of rail upgrade came in 2007, with a number of major rail routes across the country operating trains up to 250 km/h.It was not until 2008 when the first HSR line of new generation trains began passenger services at the speed of 300~350 km/h. Nevertheless, the first line’sservice market was rather limited to a distance of 117 km,connecting Tianjin with Beijing to serve initially the 2008 Olympic Games.China’s first line ofHSR servicesfor travel between city-cluster regions,coded as G-trains, started operating in December 26, 2009, beginning from Wuhan (Hubei provincial capital in MYRCCR) to the north, going through Changsha (Hunan provincial capital in MYRCCR), and ending in Guangzhou (a major city in the Peral River Delta City-Cluster Region) to the south for a distance of 1,069 km (refer to Figure 1).In 2012, the Beijing-Wuhan HSR line began operating, completing China’s major north-south trunk line (ina total length of 2,298 km) in the country’s HSR grid. Considering these historical events of HSR development pertaining to MYRCCR,we took the year of 2010 as the midpoint and the years of 2006 and 2014 as thestarting and the ending point, respectively, of our study’s timeframe.

Second, there are rich exant studies related to this article, including but not limited to:

Li H , Strauss J , Shunxiang H , et al. Do high-speed railways lead to urban economic growth in China? A panel data study of China's cities[J]. Social Science Electronic Publishing, 2017, 69(AUG.):70-89.

B S L A , B Y W , C A Z . Does China's high-speed rail development lead to regional disparities? A network perspective[J]. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2020, 138:299-321.

It should be noted that besides travel time, accessibility, CV, and economic linkage, the generalized accessibility which takes time, price and even frenquecncy into consideration is widely used in the related studies. Therefore, this paper should cite those papers and state its limitations of its research.

Response: Thank you for the great suggestion! We have revised and expanded the literature section and doubled the references reviewed (see text in Lines 71-156 in the manuscript).

In the last section of the manuscript, we added the following text discussing the limitations of the study and the directions for future research, per your suggestion.

(Lines 441-461)

The study presented in this paper has several limitations, suggesting directions for improvement in future research. First of all, the analysis of HSR-enabled travel time savings and accessibility changes can be enhanced with refined assessment of HSR level-of-service for cities in MYRCCR. As it was pointed out earlier in the paper, medium- and small-sized cities in general have a relatively low level of HSR services because of low train frequency and poor local access to HSR stations compared to large cities (Wuhan has three HSR stations all connected by in-town metros. Both Changsha and Nanchang have two rail stations operating HSR trains). The travel times derived from train time tables for this study did not capture fully the differences in HSR level-of-service between cities of different sizes. Furthermore, the analysis can be extended from the spatial dimension as carried out in this study to the social dimension and from considering time cost to incorporating monetary cost (e.g., train fares). In so doing, the distributional impacts of HSR can be adequately evaluated across cities of different income and demographic characteristics (There are diverse ethnic minorities living in the western parts of Hubei and Hunan provinces). Lastly, the analysis can be updated with most recent data. New HSR lines have been added to MYRCCR along with the national HSR network expansion since 2014. A panel data could be constructed by integrating the new socioeconomic and transportation datasets with the 2006/2014 database used in this study. With the updated panel data over a relatively long timeframe, analysts could perform rigorous modeling to improve understanding of the fixed and dynamic effects of HSR investments on the spatial development of city-regions (for example, as the studies done by Li, et al. [52] and Coronada, et al. [53]).

Third, some statements in the article should have citations or clarifications: (1) On page 4, the map should illustrate not only the sample prefectural cities, but also its position in China for the readers who don't quite familiar with the location of the cities in your research.

Response:Thank you for the suggestion! We added Figure 1, which shows China’s rail network (HSR and conventional) and the location of our study region in the country. See map above in our response to Reviewer #1’s comments.

(2) On page 4, for accessibility, why you use population as the weigh rather the economic index or the population and GDP combined index?

Response: This was a typo. It should be employment for accessibility calculation. Population and income (GDP) were considered in the calculation of economic linkage between cities in the study region.

(3) On page 5, according to the flow space theory, where does this term come from?

Response: The sentence has been deleted, to avoid confusion.

(4) On page 11, why subway, car and even bicycle transportation modes are emphasized? Since for this research, we need to focus in inter-city or inter-regional transportation modes.

Response:These modes were mentioned to make points that HSR was only one of many modes in regional transportation system. HSR needs to be integrated with other modes in order to have its positive impacts maximized. We revised the text when discussing the implications of the study findings.

The findings of this study suggest a number of policy implications for the interest of maximizing the benefits of HSR investments. First, it is extremely important to integrate HSR with other travel modes to develop a multi-modal transportation system. Due to the limitations of capital and technology, it is infeasible and inefficient for all sizes of cities to connect HSR directly. Different transportation modes, for example,airplane, subway, bus, car, and bicycle, have their mode-specific strengths and therefore have their own market niches with competitive performance efficiencies. An integrated multi-modal system can help the people and business in non-HSR cities to enjoy HSR-enabled travel time savings and accessibility gains.

Last, the English is readable and easy to be understood. However, there are some expressions which are very difficult to understand. For example:

On page 2, "Existing studies are limited in terms of data that either came from a single time point or looked at only one scale of prefecture“, this statement is not correct.

On page 11, "Second, we should give full play to the dislocation development mode of charateristic resources." I cannot understand what it means.

Response:We revised the manuscript and edited the text substantially. Thank you for your concerns!

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript has some grammatical errors. More description of the concept of accessibility and the spatial connection should be included in the introductory part.
The limitations of the research and future steps should be explained.
What is the innovation of this research?
In general, all acronyms should be written in full whenever they are used for the first time.
What software was used to create the maps?
More explanation of the choice of case study should be included. 
Probably the inclusion of an initial flow chart or table would better explain the purpose of this research.

 

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 3 Comments

 

The manuscript has some grammatical errors. More description of the concept of accessibility and the spatial connection should be included in the introductory part.

Response: Thank you for your comments! We revised the manuscript and edited the text substantially, per your and other reviewers’ suggestions.

The limitations of the research and future steps should be explained.

Response:  Thank you for your suggestions! We added a section discussing the limitations of the study and the directions for future research. See above responses to Reviewer #2’s comments.

What is the innovation of this research?

Response:  The main contribution of the work was the empirical knowledge learned from the study of county-level cities. This is a geographic scale finer than prefecture-level cities that most existing studies have used.

In several places of the text, we clarified the motivation and the value of conducting the research.

In the Introduction section (Lines 45-57):

In recent years, there has been increasing research on China's HSR effects in terms of compressions of inter-city travel time, cost,distance, competition with civil aviation, regional economic growth, and spatialinequity[16-20].Nevertheless, the empirical knowledge on China’s HSR impacts remains relatively inadequate given the large territory and diverse rural-urban settings of the country. Most existing studies on China’s HSR impacts dwelled at the prefecture-city or above level (For detailed explanations to China’s urban hierarchy, see [21]). A prefecture-city may contain one or as many as 24 counties or county-level cities (City of Baoding in Hebei Province). Hence, findings from studies at this level are important, but still limited due to the rather coarse spatial scale. This paper aims to enhance the knowledge base by presenting the empirical evidence of HSR impacts learned from a study at the county-city level in China’s Mid-Yangtze River City-Cluster Region (MYRCCR).

In the Literature Review section (Lines 124-129):

The empirical studies from the European and Asian cases suggest the varying patterns of HSR effects on accessibility at different spatial scales. Findings from one level of geography do not necessarily hold true with other levels [28, 34]. The issue is known as the modifiable area unit problem [35]. Therefore, it is important to investigate HSR impacts at multiple scales in order to gain a full scope of knowledge, which was the motivation behind this study.

(Lines 152-157)

Despite a good number of studies already exist, the knowledge on HSRimpacts in China remains limited relative to the sheer size of the countryand the drastic variation among regions of different development stages. Specifically, there have been inadequate efforts concerning HSR’s impacts on medium and small sized citiesin the fourth level (county-level cities) of China’s urban hierarchy. This study aims to fill the gap through the case study of MYRCCR.

In general, all acronyms should be written in full whenever they are used for the first time.

Response:  Thank you for the note! We checked and made sure all acronyms were written in full when they were used for the first time.

What software was used to create the maps?

Response:They were created in ArcGIS, as noted now in the manuscript.

More explanation of the choice of case study should be included. 

Response:We added discussion on the study case and its strategic location in China.

(Lines 165-172)

MYRCCRis centrally located in China, situatingin the approximate midpoint between Beijing and Guangzhou/Hong Kong on the north-south transportation backbone of China, and the east-west midpoint between Shanghai and Chongqing along the Yangtze River (Figure 1). Because of thiscritical location, MYRCCR is anticipated to develop as a growth engine incentral Chinaduring the next stage of the country’s urbanization and progress. MYRCCR is also expected to foster regional integration and reduce rural-urbandisparity through tri-province coordination and cooperation.

In the section introducing China’s HSR history (see above response to Reviewer #2’s first comment), we described that the study region had China’s first HSR (G-train) line for trans-city-cluster travel.

Probably the inclusion of an initial flow chart or table would better explain the purpose of this research.

Response:Thank you for the suggestion! With respect, we opted not to add a flow chart as suggested. Instead, in the revised Introduction, we stated explicitly the four topics that this study would focus on: “The study utilizes two years data, before and after-HSR in 2006 and 2014, respectively, and assesses HSR impacts around four topics of most concerns: travel time savings, accessibility changes, trends of spatial inequality, and economic linkage as an indicator of territorial cohesion” (Lines 57-60). Contents in Methods and Results are organized around the four topics accordingly. We hope this approach would serve the purpose of a flow chart.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to say, all the concerns of myself are well addressed and replied. I recommend acccept.

I have only two minor suggestions:

First, in the conclusion part, the authors can point out the limitations and future work of the research, for example, the general travel cost index can be applied to check the robustness of your results. For another example, if the fine micro scale data of travellers' travel behavior is available, you can make more detailed research on the impacts of HSR.

Second, I suggest you cite one important literature as follows:

[1] Liu S ,  Wan Y ,  Ha H K , et al. Impact of high-speed rail network development on airport traffic and traffic distribution: Evidence from China and Japan[J]. Transportation Research Part A Policy and Practice, 2019, 127(SEP.):115-135.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors

After revision, the manuscript is more complete and comprehensible, but a few more sentences are needed to explain the innovation of this research and the step forward made compared to other similar evaluations.
After correction of some grammatical and formatting errors in the text, this manuscript can be published. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf