Fengjun Jin

Transportation Development Transition in China

Scientific development is an invaluable asset to a country. Policies and development modes should be carried out based on scientific findings not only in industry, but also in transportation infrastructure construction. Building an integrated transportation system, which is in line with the national requirements of China and supports sustainable socio-economic development, is a key strategic issue related to building a moderately prosperous society and achieving realistic goals of a medium-level developed country. Based on a systematic review of the advances in China’s transportation infrastructure over the last 60 years, this paper explores the main drivers of transportation development, including national policy, transportation structure, investment efficiency, and technological innovation. Analysis shows that China’s comprehensive transportation infrastructure construction since 1949 can be divided into five stages initiated by these drivers, which correspond to four transition modes: policy transition, structural transition, efficiency transition, and technology transition. The transition path of China’s transportation development shows that the dominant factors have changed, and the interval for each transition has shortened. With the implementation of the ‘12th Five-Year Plan’, China’s transportation infrastructure construction is showing some new characteristics and facing a new development transition. Finally, this paper analyzes the trends in transportation development in China and concludes that technological innovation will be the main driving force to increase the transportation supply and service area in the future.

Evolution of regional transport dominance in China 1910-2012

Transport infrastructure plays an important role in shaping the configuration of spatial socio-economic structures and influencing regional accessibility. Although China’s transport infrastructure has been experiencing a rapid development in the last 100 years, there lacks a systematic examination of the complete evolution history of China’s transport development, particularly with all kinds of transport modes. This paper first aims to clarify the history of China’s transportation from 1910 to 2012, and divides its evolution process into five periods (1911, 1935, 1953, 1981 and 2012) whereby each period represents the preliminary development time for each transport mode. Second, the paper calculates the transport dominance and analyses its spatial distribution in each period, with county as the basic analysis unit. Transport dominance here is defined as an integrated indicator for evaluating regional transport conditions. The results demonstrate the following: (1) areas with relative good transport dominance have expanded from scattered dots such as Tianjin, Shanghai, Guangzhou in 1911 to extensive areas with each provincial city as cores in 2012; (2) transport development is improved by advances in transportation technology. The construction of modern transport infrastructures such as seaports, airports, high-speed rails (HSRs), and freeways lead the expansion of national territorial areas with good and excellent transport dominance and the increase of the value of transport dominance over time; (3) transport dominance is spatially unevenly distributed and exhibits resemblance with the expansion of transport network, which is closely related to China’s socio-economic development and policies.

Mining the Structure and Evolution of the Airport Network of China over the Past Twenty Years

In this paper we study the Airport Network of China (ANC), which represents Chinas domestic civil aviation infrastructure, as a complex network. We mine the structure and evolution of ANC over the past twenty years by using the real aviation data in the year of 1984, 1993 and 2006. The main contributions can be summarized as three-fold: firstly , we analyze ANC by using the complex network analysis method and find that ANC is a typical small world network with high clustering coefficient and small diameter; secondly , we find that the evolution of ANC over the past twenty years meets the densification law and shrinking/stabilizing diameter law; lastly , some interesting patterns of airports in ANC are found by the visual data mining, such as Circle Pattern, Province Capital Pattern and Star Pattern.

Spatial interaction and network structure evolvement of cities in terms of China’s rail passenger flows

Cities separated in space are connected together by spatial interaction (SI) between them. But the studies focusing on the SI are relatively few in China mainly because of the scarcity of data. This paper deals with the SI in terms of rail passenger flows, which is an important aspect of the network structure of urban agglomeration. By using a data set consisting of rail O-D (origin-destination) passenger flows among nearly 200 cities, inter-city rail distance O-D matrixes, and some other indices, it is found that the attenuating tendency of rail passenger is obvious. And by the analysis on dominant flows and spatial structure of flows, we find that passenger flows have a trend of polarizing to hubs while the linkages between hubs upgrade. However, the gravity model reveals an overall picture of convergence process over time which is not in our expectation of integration process in the framework of globalization and economic integration. Some driven factors for the re-organization process of the structure of urban agglomeration, such as technique advance, globalization, etc. are discussed further based on the results we obtained.

Progress of research on transportation geography in China

As an important branch of human geography, transportation geography has experienced three periods of evolution: foundation, systematization, and rapid development of the discipline. It has gradually become a relatively mature discipline. During the period 1930–1980, the development of transportation geography consisted mainly of the publication of theoretical texts. During 1980–2000, it gradually became a systematic discipline. Since the start of the 21st century, transportation geography has focused mainly on exploring the impacts of transportation on socio-economic development. Currently, studies on transportation geography have led to significant developments in a number of areas, including transportation theory, facility distribution and planning, transportation flows and network analysis, evaluation of transport modes, transportation planning, and simulation and assessment of urban transportation. Such studies have also enriched human geography research, provided a wider geographical overview and elucidated the development mechanism of transportation, as well as helped to understand the impacts of transport development on socio-economic systems. Some findings obtained by geographers have been widely used in transportation geography and related fields, including the four basic laws of transportation generation, the hub–spoke mode of transport organization, the subordinating and guiding functions of transportation on socio-economic development, regional transport dominance measures, accessibility measures, and spatial organization of port systems.

Analysis of transportation carbon emissions and its potential for reduction in China

The transportation industry is an essential sector for carbon emissions mitigation. This paper firstly used the LMDI (Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index) decomposition method to establish factors decomposition model on Chinas transportation carbon emission. Then, a quantitative analysis was performed to study the factors influencing Chinas transportation carbon emissions from 1991 to 2008, which are identified as transportation energy efficiency, transportation structure and transportation development. The results showed that: (1) The impact of transportation development on transportation carbon emissions showed pulling function. Its contribution value to carbon emissions remained at high growth since 1991 and showed an exponential growth trend. (2) The impact of transportation structure on transportation carbon emissions showed promoting function in general, but its role in promoting carbon emissions decreased year by year. And with the continuous optimization of transportation structure, the promoting effect decreased gradually and showed the inversed “U” trend. (3) The impact of transportation energy efficiency on transportation carbon emissions showed a function of inhibition before pulling. In order to predict the potential of carbon emission reduction, three scenarios were set. Analysis of the scenarios showed that if greater intensity emission reduction measures are taken, the carbon emissions will reduce by 31.01 million tons by 2015 and by 48.81 million tons by 2020.