From urbanization to urban clusters: impacts on urban transportation in Chinese cities

In China, rapid economic growth and increasing foreign direct investment (FDI) is the driving force for urbanization, and transformation of urban spatial structures and transportation. Frequent interactive economic activities among the neighboring cities reinforce the already spatially clustered cities. In this paper we tried to extract the key urban transportation characteristics of seventy major Chinese city using the 1997 data involving various economic and transportation features. Principal component factor analysis (PCA) accompanied by analysis of variance (ANOVA) of the factor scores were used. We found that economic indicators such as foreign direct investment (FDI) and per capita gross domestic product (GDP), land use features such as population and job densities, and transportation supply features such as road length density, public transportation supply were among the key descriptive factors. China’s urban transportation varied largely by geographic location and region. We also looked at the urban air quality over seventy cities and found that the annual average total suspended particles (TSP) and sulfur dioxide (SO2) concentrations had been decreasing continuously and significantly over the last two decades while nitrogen oxides (NOX) concentrations did not. Urban air quality showed distinct regional differences in China. Therefore, a big challenge facing Chinese urban and transportation planners is how to cope with urbanization and impacts of regional economic inter-dependency on urban transportation. We also urge the local governments to establish a transportation compliance framework to air quality standards when investing transportation projects.