Influence of Transportation Accessibility on Urban-rural Income Disparity and Its Spatial Heterogeneity

Transportation accessibility has been treated as an important means of reducing the urban-rural income disparity.However,only a few studies have examined the effects of different types of transportation accessibility on urban-rural income disparity and their spatial heterogeneity.Based on data from 285 prefecture-level(and above)Chinese cities in 2000,2005,2010,2015,and 2020,this study uses spatial econometric models to examine how highway accessibility and railway accessibility influence the urban-rural income disparity and to identify their spatial heterogeneity.The result reveals that highway accessibility and railway accessibility have‘coreperiphery’ring-like circle structures.The urban-rural income disparity exhibits strong spatial clustering effects.Both highway accessibility and railway accessibility are negatively associated with urban-rural income disparity,and the former having a greater effect size.Moreover,there is a substitution effect between highway accessibility and railway accessibility in the whole sample.Furthermore,these associations differ in geographic regions.In the central region,highway accessibility is more important in reducing the urban-rural income disparity,but its effect is weakened with the increase of railway accessibility.In the western region,railway accessibility has a larger effect on narrowing the urban-rural income disparity,and this effect is strengthened by the increase of highway accessibility.We conclude that improving transportation accessibility is conducive to reducing the urban-rural income disparity but its effect is spatial heterogenetic.Highways and railways should be developed in a coordinated manner to promote an integrated transport network system.

Using ArcGIS to Study Transportation Accessibility of Cultural Tourism Resources with Wan'an County in Jiangxi Province as an Example

This paper reviews cultural tourist attractions and transportation conditions of Wan'an County in Jiangxi Province,and calculates the accessibility and kernel density of transportation network by using ArcGIS.Through the analysis,it obtains the spatial relationship between the accessibility of Wan an County and the spatial structural characteristics of"one center,two clusters,two verticals and one horizontal"presented by the cultural tourism resources.Based on this,the paper puts forward the transportation development suggestions for the development of cultural tourism for Wan'an County.

Transportation Accessibility of Central Towns in Important Agricultural Heritage Systems Sites in Mountainous Areas and Its Impact on Local Economic Development: A Case Study of Honghe Hani Rice Terraced System, Yunnan

Transportation as a means to support industrial development can impact the economic development of important agricultural heritage sites. Because the central towns in mountainous areas have weak economic interactions with each other, an appropriate method is needed to evaluate their transportation accessibility. This paper takes the Honghe Hani Rice Terraced System(HHRTS) as a study area and develops a model to determine shortest time-distances from central towns in the study area to the nearest high-grade city as a way to evaluate transportation accessibility(TA). We then analyze the relationship between the accessibility of these towns and their economies. The study finds that the TA of the central towns in HHRTS is not good as a whole. More than 70% of the towns are more than 1 hour away from their nearest high-grade city. Of the four counties in the study area, Yuanyang County has the best traffic conditions, while Lvchun County has the worst traffic conditions. The central towns in the northern and middle regions have better TA than those in the west, southwest and east margin regions. The small-scale rural economy has little dependence on the transportation network, while secondary industries are obviously impacted by the transportation network. In the future, to support the integrated development of industries in HHRTS, traffic conditions in each town should be improved appropriately according to the industrial orientation of the town, but excessive investments to construct roads irrespective of eco-environmental impacts and economic benefits should be avoided. Especially in the case of ecologically vulnerable towns, the building high-grade roads should be banned.

Simulating multiple urban land use changes by integrating transportation accessibility and a vector-based cellular automata:a case study on city of Toronto

The accessibility provided by the transportation system plays an essential role in driving urban growth and urban functional land use changes.Conventional studies on land use simulation usually simplified the accessibility as proximities and adopted the grid-based simulation strategy,leading to the insufficiencies of characterizing spatial geometry of land parcels and simulating subtle land use changes among urban functional types.To overcome these limita-tions,an Accessibility-interacted Vector-based Cellular Automata(A-VCA)model was proposed for the better simulation of realistic land use change among different urban functional types.The accessibility at both local and zonal scales derived from actual travel time data was considered as a key driver of fine-scale urban land use changes and was integrated into the vector-based CA simulation process.The proposed A-VCA model was tested through the simulation of urban land use changes in the City of Toronto,Canada,during 2012-2016.A vector-based CA without considering the driving factor of accessibility(VCA)and a popular grid-based CA model(Future Land Use Simulation,FLUS)were also implemented for compar-isons.The simulation results reveal that the proposed A-VCA model is capable of simulating fine-scale urban land use changes with satisfactory accuracy and good morphological feature(kappa=0.907,figure of merit=0.283,and cumulative producer’s accuracy=72.83%±1.535%).The comparison also shows significant outperformance of the A-VCA model against the VCA and FLUS models,suggesting the effectiveness of the accessibility-interactive mechanism and vector-based simulation strategy.The proposed model provides new tools for a better simula-tion of fine-scale land use changes and can be used in assisting the formulation of urban and transportation planning.

The spatial pattern and governance of Zhongyuan Urban-Rural System in its development trajectory

It remains unclear on how transportation network interacts with economic network in an urban-rural agglomeration,while such knowledge is crucial for urban-rural system governance and sustainability.We explored such spatial interactions in the Zhongyuan Urban-Rural Agglomeration(ZURA)from 1995 to 2015.The structure of transportation network was measured by spatial syntax model,and that of economic network was gauged by improved gravity model.The associations between transportation and economic networks were investigated by conducting bivariate spatial autocorrelation analysis.The global Moran’s I showed that the two networks were positively correlated from 1995 to 2015.The local Moran’s I identified“high-high”associations between transportation and economic networks around core cities in 1995,which further extended to surrounding cities.Our results reveal that peripheral cities with highly developed transportation system have little spatial economic impact on neighboring rural areas,while cities with low transportation accessibility restrained its external economic influence of neighboring cities and rural areas.Our findings shed light on future urban-rural system governance,where the“multi-center,unbalanced”growth patterns of economic network and the“multi-core,multi-directional”structure of transportation network are more likely to contribute to the sustainability of urban-rural systems.