CHINA’S TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE

Current China’s Transportation Infrastructure

China that has nearly 1.4 billion population is facing a largest urbanization in history. This situation is expected to have a huge impact on population migration, productivity distribution and all other social and economic activities including transportation issue. The issue in transportation is on how to develop a comprehensive and modern transportation system which can serve the intercity and intracity traffic in effective, smooth and eco-friendly way as the critical point to the success of new urbanization (Huang, et al., 2020). Apart from the population migration, China also has experienced phenomenal economic and social growth and it resulted to the more mobility and living space. At Present, urban air pollution is increase in China as transportation mode shifts from transit and non-motorized modes to the personal automobile (Cherry, 2005).

The current situation on China’s motorization rate has grown, it will be more severe due to high population. In China there are about seven personal automobiles per 1000 people, this figure does not include privately owned trucks or publicly owned vehicles (including buses and trucks), which increases the number of automobiles to about 28 vehicles per 1000 people. By 2020, the total automobile fleet (not including motorcycles) is expected to grow by between three and seven times the current size depending on economic growth rates (NRC, 2003). The visualization of motorization growth in China is in below chart:

Figure 1

Figure 1. Motorization Growth (Cherry, 2005)

 

The improvement of transportation system in China since 1949 until today can be seen in several public transportations such as air, rail, highway, waterway, and urban transport. Airlines in China offers 1,279 air routes. Among them, 1,035 are domestic, including the routes to Hong Kong and Macau, and 244 are international. The most popular airports are in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Apart from Hong Kong and Macau, there are over 200 airports in mainland China, connecting more than 100 internal cities and 80 foreign cities (ChinaTravel, 2020). Chinese airlines grew international passenger traffic by 14% in 2018 and have more than doubled international passenger traffic over the past five years. There are now 29 Chinese airlines competing in the international market, compared with 12 airlines five years ago. From those China airlines, China Eastern Airlines put the top position in terms of seat share and number of routes currently (Centreforaviation, 2019).

Train as the main way of transportation in China has in total mileage amounts to 124 thousand kilometers. The Chinese railway network is 124,000 kilometers long in total, of which 22,000 km belong to high speed railways. These railways cover almost every place in China, even remote mountainous areas, plateaus, and the seaside. The domestic service divides into 5 main categories: high-speed trains, fast trains, tourist trains, express and normal passenger trains (ChinaTravel, 2020). Currently, 30 of China’s 33 provincial-level administrative divisions have high-speed railways. China has the world’s longest high-speed railway network, it happened due to big area that China has. China High-speed trains are designed for speeds of 200 to 350 kph (kilometer per hour) (124 to 217 mph). There are three types of high-speed trains in China: G, D, or C trains.

 

Detail of Trains G Trains D Trains C Trains
Maximum Speed 350 kph (217 mph) 250 kph (155 mph) 200 kph (124 mph)
Second Class V V V
First Class V V V
Superior Class V   V
Business Class V V  
Soft Sleeper   V  
Deluxe Soft Sleeper   V  

Table 1. Design Speeds and Ticket Classes (Chinahighlights, 2020)

 

China possesses numerous and complex highways at all levels, connecting almost all cities, towns and countryside. Safety, quality, convenience and capacity of Chinese expressways have been developed rapidly. The length of highways in China amounts to 1.18 million km, including 68 national highways and over 1600 provincial highways. The Chinese government is speeding up the development of expressways to promote the economy of China. Beijing, as the capital of China, has 11 national highways, linking with plenty of other cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Wuhan, Chengdu, Changsha, Taiyuan and Xian (ChinaTravel, 2020). Although China has huge highways up to now, it reported that China suffered one of the worst backups on the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway, one of the nation’s busiest thoroughfares (Gorzelany, 2015).  Beforehand, Beijing reported as a quite top polluted cities in the world, however currently Beijing has reduced smog levels and dropped down a list falling to 199 from 84 three years before, according to the 2019 World Air Quality Report published by IQAir AirVisual (Marlow and Dormido, 2020).

Further discussion for waterways, China has 110,000 kilometers of navigable rivers, streams, lakes, and canals, more than any country in the world. The Heilong Jiang; Yangtze River; Xiang River, a short branch of the Yangtze; Pearl River; Huangpu River; Lijiang River; and Xi Jiang are the main ones. The Grand Canal is the world’s longest canal at 1,794 km and serves 17 cities between Beijing and Hangzhou. It links five major rivers: the Haihe, Huaihe, Huanghe, Qiantang, and Yangtze. Construction of new railways and highways has diminished the use of China’s rivers for passenger transport. Nonetheless, passenger boats are still popular in some mountainous regions, such as Western Hubei and Chongqing (the Three Gorges area), where railways are few and road access to many towns is inconvenient (ChinaTravel, 2020).

As for urban transportation, China subways has developed well in the past 10 years. Today, there are more than 60 metro lines (paywall) in 25 cities, making subterranean transit accessible to some 291 million people (Zhou and Huang, 2017). China’s largest cities have seen their own networks expand exponentially. Beijing now has 22 lines covering nearly 380 miles and serving some 10 million passengers each day. Shanghai’s metro, which opened in 1993, currently holds the title of being the longest in the world, running 398 miles in total. Both will continue to grow. At the end of 2017, China’s top economic body, the National Development Reform Commission, announced plans to relax the requirements needed for local governments to pursue subway projects. That includes lowering the minimum population from 3 million to 1.5 million, which means more third- and even fourth-tier cities can expect to put in their own proposals (Poon, 2018). The problem is the speed of adapting to the new way of commuting has not kept pace which lead to efficiency of the transportation.

Apart from subways, in big cities, buses are numerous, and the system works rather well. Even if you don’t speak Chinese, you can manage, on condition of taking a map with the names of the streets in Chinese. Do not hesitate to verify the destination with a Chinese traveler (ChinaTravel, 2020). As well as bus, taxi also convenient with clear meter, almost systematically used. Taxis are everywhere at any time of day and night. You have just to hail them or to call by phone. However, these two-transportation tool lead to the congestion that happened in highways as mention previously.

 

China’s Transportation Issue

Like many rapidly industrializing countries, China’s cities face ongoing challenges relating to transport. Although China already have and build various transportation infrastructure, however congestion remains a serious problem and air quality remains persistently poor. It’s right that the air quality becoming better and better but still consider poor. This combination of congestion and pollution is economically wasteful, harmful to health and reduces the quality of life for citizens (Andrewsspeed, 2020).

After such a big development in China’s transportation infrastructure, most of the transport projects are concentrated in central and eastern regions in China which lead to the question of equal regional accessibility and induce more uneven development. The western region is poorly served by roads compared to the central and coastal regions. Another issue that China’s face is the growth of private ownership which has provided greater opportunity for people to select their own housing, work place, business, entertainment, and other activities, has led to the progressive dispersal of the cities and excessive motorized travel volumes which generates negative impact to the urban environment as well as traffic accident. According to the data available, in 2017 vehicle mortality in China was 51.6 higher than in developed countries (Mu and Jung, 2012).

 

Factors for Future Transportation Development in China

Several factors that might affect China’s future transportation infrastructure such as:

 

A.     Tourism

Tourism has become an important contributor to the domestic economy in China since the beginning of reform and opening in the early eighties. It is a main contributor to GDP for and that’s why transportation has a big role to boost tourism in a country due to it links tourists from one location to another. With the continuous developments going on in the field of transportation, some countries still lack proper infrastructure in terms of transportation. China, being one of the biggest economies has to continuously work on transport systems to serve tourists. The development of transportation, transportation vehicles, infrastructure and using new technologies in this sector speed up the development of tourism. If we pay attention to the statistics of China National Tourism Administration, we may see that the tourism dynamics has changed and increased rapidly between 2010 and 2020. A record 56 million mainland tourists travelled overseas in 2010. Outbound tourism is strong, with domestic Chinese tourists making 2.1 billion trips, up 11 percent over 2009, bringing revenue of US$189 billion. By 2020, industry experts have predicted that China will top the tourism industry list at US$688.5 billion (Absolute China Tours, 2020). This trend can be explained with different factors. But the main important factor here is the rapid development of transportation sector and application of technological innovations which enable the tourists to reach many destinations of the world. On the other hand, it has been grown because of fast economic development and the growth of people’s incomes.

 

B.     GDP per Capita of China

GDP per capita is a measure of a country’s economic output that accounts for its number of people. It divides the country’s gross domestic product by its total population. That makes it a good measurement of a country’s standard of living. It tells you how prosperous a country feels to each of its citizens. China GDP has been increased significantly in these past 20 years. In 2015 it was $8,033 and becoming $9,771 in 2018 (Macrotrends, 2020). This situation is breaking the barriers of a centrally planned closed economy to evolve into a manufacturing and exporting hub of the world. China is often referred to as the “world’s factory,” given its huge manufacturing and export base (Silver, 2019). GDP per capita and transportation infrastructure give each other positive impacts. Government that build better transportation infrastructure could help making cities the key to economic progress and vice versa. China’s rising GDP per capita means greater buying power and an economy boosted not only by manufacturing but also increasingly by consumption. Such as traveling in long distances both within and outside the country (Zhu, 2020).

Figure 3

Figure 2. GDP Per Capita China 2000-2018 (Macrotrends, 2020)

 

C.     Growth of Special Economic Zones (SEZs)

China’s remarkable process of economic growth through globalization began in 1978 with the implementation of the “Open Door Policy”. It enabled a partial liberalization of the factors of production and permitted private and corporate capital accumulation, which was mostly forbidden beforehand. This was followed by a massive wave of investments and rapid expansion of China’s transport infrastructure base.

There is no doubt that major regional disparities exist within China. The gap between its eastern coastal regions compared with the central and western regions has only grown wider over time. China’s special economic zones (SEZs) are defined as small geographical areas that allow the integration of free-market principles to attract additional foreign investment. However, the creation and success of SEZs has led to prosperity in the coastal regions of China, creating additional economic disparity between regions.

Figure 4

Figure 3. China Gross Domestic Product by Region 2015 (Crane, et al., 2018)

Certain approaches must be taken in order to reduce the regional disparities within China. These approaches should include investment in the infrastructure of the less-developed regions, developing a greater network of social protection programs that benefit the poor, and reform within local governments to redistribute and better handle economic resources at the local level. At the same time, these benefits have been experienced largely by the coastal regions where SEZs have been implemented. No SEZs currently exist within the central and western regions. Therefore, expansion of SEZs in future will require transport infrastructure. It is a big challenge coming up for China and an effective system must be implemented (Crane, et al., 2018).

 

D.     Population and Level Employment

Population is the biggest concern for China currently. Over the past 30 years, the Chinese economy has experienced unprecedented growth in terms of population and demand for vehicles (Wang, 2015). China is now the second largest world economy, after the US. In 2019, the employment rate in China decreased to 65.2 percent, from 65.7 percent in the previous year. China is the world’s most populous country and its rapid economic development over the past decades has profited greatly from its large labor market. While the overall working conditions for the Chinese people are improving, the actual size of the labor force in China has been shrinking steadily in recent years (Statista, 2020). It boosts the economic capability to have better life such as utilize more public transportation as well as buying vehicles.

 

China’s Future Transportation Demand

Several factors that already being shared in the previous section lead to future demand of China’s transportation infrastructure. Fortunately, the re-occurrence of new technology over the years has helped us on how we live and carry out our day to day activities, and most of this development is as a result of inventing and creating a new ways to reduce our daily stress and live an improved life. It’s also can help current transportation problem in China.

A.     Maglev (Magnetic Train Travel)

It’s current that currently China already have high-speed train, they started to develop maglev train from Shanghai. Maglev means that the train doesn’t actually touch the tracks but rather floats above them. The electrically charged magnets repel the train from the tracks to keep the train levitated, and the lack of friction between the train and the track enables the high speeds (Curiosity, 2016). To have equitable development, then maglev can be built across China especially in the western part. The benefit of using this maglev apart from rapid transportation, carry lots of people then it can also reduce pollution of the country.

 

B.     Electric Cars

Increasing pollution and the threat of global warming have accentuated the need to replace petroleum-fueled vehicles with emission-free substitutes. After decades of R&D, the industry has found electric vehicles as the best substitute for conventional vehicles, which has resulted in the emergence of electric vehicles. The Asia Pacific region has the highest sales of electric vehicles. China is focusing on electric vehicles to deal with the rising vehicle emission in the country and the Chinese government is providing subsidies for the electrification of vehicles, which, in turn, has increased the sales of electric vehicles in China (Lecar, 2019). This movement that initiated from the government is a good move which turn into decreasing the pollution within China.

 

C.     Boeing Electric Freighter

The United Nations aviation body forecasts that airplane emissions of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, will reach just over 900 million metric tons in 2018, and then triple by 2050 (Tabuchi, 2019). Since China airline is growing rapidly until now, they should start to develop aircraft with less impact to the environment. Boeing future research and development priorities that on future possibility for electric-powered freighter aircraft. It’s a significant step toward a future in which autonomous, electric “flying taxis” zip from skyscraper to skyscraper, bearing passengers and cargo in service of an entirely new form of urban mobility (Hawkins, 2019).

Figure 5

Figure 2. Boeing Electric Freighter (Hawkins, 2019)

 

D.     Future Highways

Road transportation is still important for China, even if they replace the car into electric, they still need a good competent highway for their transportation infrastructure. Numerous companies and organizations are working on creating smart highways using sensors that will help detect and reroute traffic. It’s predicted that the components in vehicles working along with the sensors embedded in the highways themselves. Safety measures in highways will help prevent crashes by detecting car position, speed and momentum. When conditions change suddenly on the road, the system will override a car’s manual control system. It will mean we’ll surrender some of our freedom to a larger system, but it will also lead to fewer accidents and traffic jams (Strickland, 2020). This is important since the traffic accident in China relatively high.

 

Modern transportation is currently experiencing major changes, big applause to the transformative transportation technologies. Almost all the points discussed above are becoming the next innovation occurrence in the transportation sector that will increase how we live and improve the efficiency of transportation system in the world in general.

 

 

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~ by sankerenti on May 25, 2020.

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