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2023 | Book

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Population Growth and Sustainable Transport in China

Authors: Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan

Publisher: Springer Nature Singapore

Book Series : Population, Regional Development and Transport

Part of: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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About this book

This book discusses the links between population growth, migration and the transport system in China. It first reviews the theories concerning the relationship between population growth, distribution and transport systems from an international perspective and then analyses the history of and changes in population growth, population migration, urbanisation and population spatial distribution in China by using multiple data sources, including the census, China Family Panel Studies data, China Migrants Panel Studies data and mobile phone data. Thirdly, it explores the effects of population growth and migration on transport infrastructures and services in terms of planning, investments, development, operation and management. The book also evaluates the features, strengths and weaknesses of various population policies on the basis of their impacts on transport, birth control, the hukou system, the migration management system and the policies designed to limit the growth of large cities and encourage the growth of small cities.

Further, it addresses transport policies in the context of their capacity to meet people’s mobility and accessibility needs and other factors, including energy consumption, environment pollution and regional development inequalities. Examining the trends in population distribution and their influences on transport, such as an increase in urban agglomeration and mega city regions in the east of China and population shrinkage in the cities and regions in northeast and west China, it also investigates the new trends of rural migration and population movement during the Spring Festival and other public holidays and the challenges of these new trends for transport system.

Lastly, the book discusses future directions and challenges, sustainable population and transport policies and proposes population-oriented transport strategies and accessibility-based population distribution policies.

Relevant to China and other developing countries, the book is a valuable resource for scholars interested in population studies, sustainable transportation, regional planning and development and environmental policy.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Chapter 1. Introduction
Abstract
This chapter introduces the importance and necessity of investigating the population growth and sustainable transport in China, major purposes and analytical framework, as well as mainly applied data source of this book. By analysing China's transport system based on achievements in past decades, demographic characteristics and the trend of changes, transport service quality and accessibility based on population, and population differentiation of travel behaviour, we aim to achieve three main research purposes, including exploring China's population structure and transport development, identifying the differentiation of travel behaviour, and providing policy implications for building people-oriented and sustainable transport system in China. Multiple source of data are applied for national-level analysis and city cases analysis. Both the collection details and data contents are included.
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
Chapter 2. China’s Transport System
Abstract
Transport system plays an important role in driving the development of regions and countries. The quality and efficiency of transport infrastructure are definitely vital basis for sustainability and human–land harmonisation. Before exploring the relationship between population growth and transport, it is of necessity to comprehensively understand the historical achievements and current progress of China's transport system. In this chapter, we analyse the development of China’s transport in the past few decades along a timeline, including three periods namely a preliminary form, the development of a complete system, and optimisation. We also analyse the time–space changes in China’s fixed asset investment in transport facilities since the start of the 21st century, based on five transport sectors namely highway, water transport, aviation, railway, and logistics. It is found that China has made great achievements in building a modern and high-quality comprehensive transport system consisted of transport corridors connecting the key nodes with high density and rapid development. Since the reform and opening up, transport infrastructure has gone through a stage of large-scale investment and construction, during which the scale, quality and technology of China’s transport infrastructure have been significantly improved. However, the coupling of incremental investment distribution and population spatial patterns still needs to be strengthened. Analysis and discussions in this chapter provide a macro background for further focus on the matches of transport with population growth as well as the transport demand influenced by population structure.
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
Chapter 3. Population Growth and Urban–Rural Structure
Abstract
The urban–rural structure of the population has been a key issue in China for several decades. In the new era of social development, China has put forward the Rural Revitalisation Development Strategy, which emphasises the coordinated development of urban and rural areas as a vital basis for promoting social harmony and improving people’s quality of life. Thus, understanding the current characteristics and changing trends of China’s urban–rural structure are of great necessity in terms of building a high-quality and sustainable transport system. In this chapter, we focus on the characteristics of China’s population growth and its dualistic urban–rural structure. Using the data from National Statistical Yearbooks as well as several surveys on society and people’s daily lives, we discuss both the temporal and the spatial characteristics of dualistic urban–rural structure in China. We make recommendations for the future development of transport development based on the empirical analysis results. We found that since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the total population has shown a stable trend of linear growth. However, the overall natural population growth rate appears to be decreasing, which means population growth has slowed down greatly. In the past few decades, the typical characteristics of China’s dualistic urban–rural structure could be summarised as a stable increase in the urbanisation rate, a significant urban–rural income gap, localisation trends of rural migrant workers, continuous optimisation of rural residents’ income structure, and spatial imbalance in the urbanisation process. Through analysing the characteristics of population growth from an urban–rural perspective, this chapter provides empirical evidence for the transport planning and policymaking necessary to develop a fair and refined transport service system in China.
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
Chapter 4. Family Structure, Gender and Education
Abstract
This chapter focuses on the current characteristics and changing trends of China’s population structure from the perspectives of family, gender and education. With the reform of fertility policies, changes in birth willingness and gender conceptions, as well as attitudes towards education, China’s family structure, its gender structure and the education structure of the population are certain to go through a long period of optimisation due to these complicated and significant changes. Learning the temporal and spatial characteristics of population structure based on family attributes, gender and education level is vital for understanding the population growth in China and looking forward to the relative changes in transport demand. Since the family is the most basic unit for people’s daily activities, groups with different family attributes will have different travel preferences and living habits. The first section discusses current characteristics and typical trends of family structure through statistical analysis using data from China Statistical Yearbooks and several surveys on society and people’s livelihood. The second section analyses China’s gender structure mainly based on indicators such as total gender ratio, gender ratio by age group, gender ratio by population category, and the gender differences in social attributes. The third section focuses on the education structure of China’s population, which is regarded as a key indicator for population quality in previous studies, with the application of indicators including the highest education degree and regional illiteracy rate. The findings of this chapter make contributions to the literature and practice by providing an empirical basis for developing a more diversified and refined transport service system in the demographic context of China.
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
Chapter 5. Population-Based Service Level and the Accessibility of Transport
Abstract
With the development goal of building a people-oriented and sustainable transport system in China, service level and accessibility of transport services are two of the key indicators for evaluating the coupling of transport construction and people's actual travel demand. In this chapter, the spatial match between population and transport distribution is measured by population-based service quality using national spatial data on population and transport infrastructure. Aimed at drawing an overall picture of China’s comprehensive transport system, the population-based evaluation analysis of transport services includes four perspectives which are railways, highways, high-speed railways, and air transport. Both the temporal changing trends and the spatial distribution characteristics of China’s transport system in recent years in terms of satisfying people’s travel demand are focused on. In addition, we also analyse the accessibility of China’s comprehensive transport system while considering demographic factors. The population-based service quality and accessibility level can serve as a basis for following chapters exploring the relationship between population structure and transport demand, as well as provide empirical evidence for optimising transport services to be more in harmony with the national population growth.
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
Chapter 6. Travel Differences Between the Urban and Rural Population
Abstract
The dualistic urban–rural structure has been a typical feature of China’s society in the past few decades, also being one of the roots of China’s current social contradiction between unbalanced development and people’s increasing expectations for high-quality life. There is no doubt that a transport layout consistent with a dualistic urban–rural structure is conducive to giving play to the economic driving role of transport, narrowing the gap between urban and rural areas, promoting social equity and supporting the national rural revitalisation strategy. Based on China’s temporal and spatial characteristics of urban–rural structure summarised in previous sections, this chapter investigates the relationship between urban–rural attributes and residents’ travel behaviour from three perspectives: (a) the differences in daily travel habits between urban residents and rural residents based on data from CFPS; (b) the differences in travel behaviour among residents living in city centres, townships and villages of several typical case cities based on data from National Detailed Survey of Small Towns and evidence from previous studies; and (c) the differences in travel behaviour among residents living in central areas, suburban areas and outer suburban areas of the typical megacity Beijing based on data from Beijing’s Comprehensive Survey of City Traffic Issues. The results have proved that people living in different areas of the urban–rural system perform quite differently in travel behaviour and travel preference, such as travel experience, time allocation for travel, choice of travel mode, travel purpose, travel space range and transport vehicle ownership. The significant urban–rural gaps in travel behaviour will definitely lead to different transport demand between the urban population and the rural population, making it necessary to provide more differentiated and more inclusive transport service across different regions and areas in the context of developing people-oriented and sustainable transport in China.
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
Chapter 7. Effects of Family Structure on Travel Behaviour
Abstract
Family is the basic unit of the social and economic activities of the population. A large number of studies abroad have shown that family attributes have an important influence on the daily activities and travel behaviour of individuals, but there is still a lack of relevant research on family travel behaviour in China. Based on the family structure attributes of the population, this study uses statistical description analysis and multiple logistic regression analysis to identify travel behaviour differences between different family types, and it quantitatively examines the family attributes that affect individual travel decisions. The results show that the trip volume of single-person households is higher than that of multi-person households, and the proportion of leisure trip activities is larger. Households with higher incomes and larger scales have higher car ownership rates, but lower bicycle ownership rates. In general, factors such as family size, family income level, family transport ownership, whether there are children in the family, whether there are older people, etc., all have varying degrees of impact on residents’ travel behaviour. With the characteristics of miniaturisation and diversification of family types in China’s population structure, high-quality transport services that meet the needs of the population need to combine the differentiated travel characteristics of different families to provide customised and personalised travel services.
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
Chapter 8. Gendered Mobility
Abstract
Gender differences in travel behaviour have been a key issue in the field of travel decision-making. Ensuring gender equity in travel services is an important part of social equity. Many foreign studies have focused on the various differences in travel characteristics between men and women. There are relatively few studies on gender difference in travel behaviour in China, and discussions on the reasons for the formation of gender difference are also quite scarce. This study takes the megacity of Beijing as an example, uses the 2015 Beijing residents’ travel survey data to identify the differences in travel decisions of male and female residents, and discusses the gender gaps in travel purpose, travel mode, trip frequency and travel space span. The results show that the travel activities of male residents in Beijing are mainly for working, and that they are more dependent on private transport. The proportion of leisure activities among female residents is significantly higher than that of males, and the use rate of public transport is higher. In addition, the data show that male residents have a relatively higher trip frequency per day and a relatively wider space span of trips. Based on these gender gaps in travel behaviour, a comprehensive transport service system that adapts to the population structure, especially the gender structure, is necessary to provide differentiated and personalised travel services to protect women’s travel rights and to promote transport equity.
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
Chapter 9. Relationship Between Education and Travel Behaviour
Abstract
Educational level is an important content and widely used indicator of population quality. The composition structure of residents’ education level can reflect the characteristics of the local population. For individuals, the education experience generally has a significant influence on their living habits and their way of thinking, which may lead to differentiation in travel patterns and travel preferences among groups with different levels of education. In recent years, with the rapid advancement of modernisation and urbanisation, the overall quality of China’s population has greatly improved, education resources in various regions have been largely optimised and the problem of educational inequity or lack of education has been alleviated. However, with ongoing factors such as the gaps in regional development and the unbalanced allocation of natural resources, there is remains long away to go in promoting education equity across regions and giving more consideration to disadvantaged groups. High-quality transport that adapts to population development should fully allow for the livelihood requirements, travel demand and individual preferences of groups with different levels of education to provide inclusive and harmonious transport services. In this chapter, the focus is on the population’s quality structure, and it comprehensively analyses the differences in travel characteristics of different groups taking education level as the key indicator. The results and conclusions may provide empirical evidence for optimising China’s transport system towards the goal of being more human-oriented and sustainable.
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
Chapter 10. Policy Implications
Abstract
Based on the previous analysis and discussion, this chapter discusses the relevant policies on transport development and implementation measures in China in recent years, and it puts forward future policy recommendations based on this review. The review and discussions on policies are organised by three core topics: developing a people-oriented and high-quality transport system, promoting refined and customised transport that adapts to differences in population travel characteristics, and paying attention to the diversity of people’s travel demands to promote transport equity. For each topic, we first take a comprehensive review through listing the recent policies and regulations promulgated in China, and then second we demonstrate the advanced measures of some cities or regions based on the implementation status of the policies, and we discuss the advantages and problems. Finally, we put forward relevant and reasonable development suggestions according to the previous research conclusions. Through detailed review and discussion, this chapter applies the research results in this book to policy formulation and development practice.
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
Chapter 11. Summary
Abstract
This chapter summarizes the main conclusions and contributions of the research in previous chapters. Through analysing the temporal and spatial evolution of China’s population and transport system based on empirical evidence, as well as discussing the social differentiation associated with the travel behaviour, we have made some further steps compared with the existing literature. The results and findings can be applied to develop policy aimed at the people-oriented and sustainable development of future transport in China, as well as make contributions to policymaking and transport development in other developing countries and regions in the world.
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
12. Correction to: Population Growth and Sustainable Transport in China
Pengjun Zhao, Dandan Yuan
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Population Growth and Sustainable Transport in China
Authors
Pengjun Zhao
Dandan Yuan
Copyright Year
2023
Publisher
Springer Nature Singapore
Electronic ISBN
978-981-19-7470-0
Print ISBN
978-981-19-7469-4
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-7470-0