One change in transportation infrastructure necessary to facilitate urban industrial development

Transportation provides essential support for national, regional and urban economic and social development. Transportation is also an important factor in the assessment of regional flow and logistics, which can effectively improve the competitiveness of countries, regions, cities and individuals (Lin, 1999). As a basic platform for the transformation of the economic development mode, transportation infrastructure determines the layout and development of various industries (Song et al., 2014). A well-developed transportation system links individual to facilitate the flow of resources and to increase the productivity of the industrial sectors. With the acceleration of urbanization and economic development, people need more transportation land (transport infrastructure) to meet the needs of survival and production (Gillen, 1996). The completeness of transportation infrastructure has become the focus of the attention given to this topic. Most countries, especially developed countries, have taken action in response to the challenges posed by insufficient transportation infrastructure, and have implemented such projects as the TRANSPLUS project launched by the European Union in 2000 (Timms, 2011), Australia’s national land transport network that was established in 2014, and the United States’ strategic plan, known as " Beyond Traffic ", established in 2015 (Mendez et al., 2017).

Exploring the factors that affect the construction of transportation infrastructure (Banister and Berechman, 2001; Paulley et al., 2006), as well as its planning (Short and Kopp, 2005), evaluation (Yang, 2019) and demand prediction have been prevailing topics in the fields of transport geography and urban sustainable development. The demand for the transportation infrastructure is likely to increase further with economic growth (Herranz-Loncán, 2007; Hong et al., 2011), population growth, industrialization (Bjorvatn, 2000), industrial productivity, urbanization (Aljoufie et al., 2013), land-use change (Kasraian et al., 2016) and other factors (Gramlich, 1994; Ramanathan and Parikh, 1999). The relationship between transportation and economic development is one of the most discussed topics in research, and the view that transportation promotes economic growth is widely recognized (Démurger, 2001; Mody and Wang, 1997). Economic development has resulted in the expansion of various industrial sectors, particularly the manufacturing sector (Szirmai and Verspagen, 2015), of which transportation is a basic input (Deng, 2013). Moreover, the demand for transportation infrastructure continues to increase, driven by the availability of increased household disposable income (Pradhan and Bagchi, 2013).

Transportation is a key element in industrial location selection (Button et al., 1995), and changes in transportation infrastructure investment directly affect industry productivity (Fernald, 1999). However, the transport sector cannot yield large changes in industry output by itself (Canning and Bennathan, 1999) but is complementary to other industrial sectors (Gannon and Liu, 1997). Cities with relatively complete transportation infrastructure generally have higher levels of industrial development and more concentrated industrial distribution (Hanson, 2001; Henderson, 2003). The increasing construction of transportation infrastructure has reduced transportation costs, thereby promoting the regional agglomeration of industries (Mejia-Dorantes et al., 2012). The distribution of transportation and industry conforms to the "core-periphery model" (Krugman, 1991a), and the transportation cost of manufactured products follows the "iceberg transport cost model" (Krugman, 1991b). In other words, the manufacturing industry will tend to become concentrated in areas with lower transportation costs and then will form regional manufacturing centers in these areas (McCann, 2005). Therefore, the way in which transportation infrastructure guides the manufacturing layout of an area is though changing the transportation cost of the production process and determining the range of markets that enterprises can reach (Buurman and Rietveld, 1999; Holl, 2004a). In addition, different transportation modes have different effects on industrial development. Highways have a significant role in promoting the development of manufacturing (Holl, 2004b), and railways have played a significant role in promoting the development of the metal smelting industry (Liu et al., 2015). These effects also mean that different industries have different levels of dependence on transportation (Qin et al., 2013).

Transportation design, planning, evaluation, and demand prediction are the starting points for the sustainable development of urban transportation. Many methods of urban transportation planning have been proposed, and most current transportation planning focuses on providing the capacity to meet transportation demand by estimating increases in traffic flow (Jiang et al., 2013; Zhou and Zhu, 2007). A transportation network is planned based on demand predication (Bigotte et al., 2010). With the intent of fully considering the spatial information of the city, the optimization plan of the urban transportation network of the area and the future expansion direction of the transportation network are proposed (Farahani et al., 2013; Tu et al., 2014). Furthermore, transportation planning is an important part of urban land use planning (Shore, 2006; Waddell et al., 2020; Zhao and Peng, 2012). Therefore, integrated land use and transportation interaction have become research directions exploring sustainable urban development (Bartholomew, 2007; Peng et al., 2011; Shaw and Xin, 2003). From the perspective of transportation evaluation, most studies select evaluation indicators such as traffic accessibility (Guthrie et al., 2017) and traffic circulation (Wright et al., 1989) to evaluate the service capacity of an area’s urban transportation infrastructure.

Transportation demand prediction methods mainly include statistical prediction, spatial economic models (Anderson, 1999, 2005; Cohen, 2010) and the four stages (or four steps) transportation/land use model (Ahmed, 2012). Statistical prediction mainly uses statistical methods (e.g., multiple regression prediction model and computable general equilibrium) to find the amount of change in transportation land over time using existing data and to use this information to predict of the demand for transportation land of certain countries, provinces, and cities (Anas and Yu, 2007). This technique is a more sophisticated statistical method that does not consider urban transformation and industrial transformation. The four stage (or four-step) transportation/land use model is a classic traffic geography model that follows a sequential procedure (trip generation, trip distribution, modal split, and traffic assignment) to predict transportation demand. This model relies on an extensive array of data, including land use data, travel generation factors, friction of distance factors, calibration factors and transportation networks, and these data can be obtained through census information, surveys and estimates (Rodrigue et al., 2016).

In summary, the current studies on transportation focus on urban-scale transportation planning, evaluation and layout optimization; most of these studies are conducted on the "line" level, which means that the planning, evaluation and layout optimization of transportation routes are studied. Research on the supply and demand of transportation land in prefecture-level cities is lacking. Few previous studies have conducted research from the perspective of the supply and demand of transportation land, and more of them regard transportation infrastructure as an important factor affecting urban land use. However, transportation infrastructure requires land as a carrier to perform its functions, and transportation land is considered an important type of land use in many countries. Compared with the research on transportation networks, research on the supply and demand of transportation land is more macroscopic, which can provide scientific reference for decision makers on transportation land supply. Furthermore, China is urbanizing at an astonishing pace, especially after China's reform and development, the construction of transportation infrastructure has been intensified. However, there are two extreme conditions in Chinese cities: a huge gap in transportation land or an excessive saturation of transportation land (Yang and Gakenheimer, 2007). Therefore, it is particularly important for Chinese government agency to formulate a targeted transportation land supply decision-making system. This paper aims to 1) construct a transportation land supply decision framework that consider the dependency, dominant and restriction of transportation and its theoretical land demand. 2) present the land supply decision-making reference for transportation land.

General situations of study area

The Yangtze River Economic Belt spans China's eastern, central and western major regions, covers a surface area of 205 million km2, and is located at 97°31′E-122°12′E and 21°8′N-35°20′N. The region's GDP and population account for nearly 40 % of China’s totals. It has a unique geographical advantage and is the best "National Strategic Support Zone" to promote the linkage and revitalization of the national economy. As it relies on the Yangtze River Gold Waterway, the Yangtze River Economic Belt

Dependence of urban industrial development on transportation in the Yangtze River Economic Belt

Nearly two-thirds of the cities in the Yangtze River Economic Belt fall into the medium to high transportation dependence category, and there are no cities with low transportation dependence in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, which indicates that industrial development generally depends on the support of transportation (Fig. 4). Cities with a medium to low level of transportation dependency are mainly distributed in the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River, and most of these cities’

Main achievements

The land that is supplied during the process of sustainable urban development is constrained by a variety of conditions, and the use of multiple objective-oriented land supply decisions ensure that the land is supplied in an efficient and targeted way. Socioeconomic and ecological benefits, industrial development status, and urban transportation planning are important factors that affect the supply of transportation land. Based on a comprehensive consideration of levels of transportation

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Ling Wang: Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft. Ke Wang: Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft. Jianjun Zhang: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Supervision. Di Zhang: Data curation, Writing - review & editing. Xia Wu: Writing - review & editing. Lijun Zhang: Data curation.

Acknowledgements

This article is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant Number: 2652019305), the Research Funds for Information Center of the Ministry of Natural Resources of the People’s Republic of China (Grant Number: 2018-34-0106-14).

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