Impacts of high-speed rails on the accessibility inequality of railway network in China

Much literatures have focused on the analysis of the impacts of accessibility brought by HSR, but analysis on the uneven accessibility impacts and patterns of China´s high-speed rail are not complete. This paper will present an inequality analysis from the national level based on each station´s time accessibility from the actual timetable in four stages, namely, the stage 1 with traditional rail service (before Aug. 2008), the stage 2 with HSR lines (between Aug. 2008 and July 2011), the stage 3 with speed-reduced HSR lines (between Aug. 2011 and Nov. 2012), and the stage 4 with some new HSR lines(between Dec. 2012 and Jan. 2013). Finally, this paper gives several suggestions to guide the allocation of new high-speed railway lines and the collaborative operations with other kinds of railway train lines. In addition, the proposed method is also useful to promote the HSR service more fairly.