High-Speed Rail Transit System of the Largest Urban Agglomerations of China

The rapid growth of Chinese cities in the 1990s–2020s, the territorial expansion of urban agglomerations and the formation of megalopolises have led to an aggravation of transport problems within them. Although the extensive growth of the network of conventional subway lines in Chinese cities in the 2000s–2020s has partially solved the problem of population movement, it has exhausted its potential and it cannot completely resolve it due to the low speed of communication with a significant increase in distances in rapidly spreading cities and urban agglomerations. The only way to solve it is the construction of high-speed rail systems, the lines of which cut through urban areas in the central parts either underground or on overpasses, and also connect the outskirts of cities with their center, satellite cities, suburban areas and other cities of the urban agglomeration. The Chinese experience of creating three different versions of high-speed suburban-urban railways is considered. The most successful of these are the construction of a separate network of such roads in Shanghai, as well as a hybrid system of high-speed rail communication in the urban agglomeration of the Pearl River Delta, combining different speed levels (intercity high-speed lines of suburban-urban railways, express and conventional subway, light rail transit). Not so effective is the system of suburban-urban railways of the Beijing urban agglomeration, passing along the least congested directions. Analysis of the distribution of the lengths of individual subway lines made it possible to determine 4 groups of spatial sizes of large Chinese cities: with the maximum radius from their centers of 20–30, 16–23, 14–21 and 9–15 km. Urban agglomerations of China have a maximum radius of 110–130 km with a minimum travel time of 40–45 minutes from the center of their cores (at a train speed of 140–200 km/h), megalopolises 300–330 km and 75–90 minutes (at a high-speed train speed of 250–350 km/h). Urban agglomerations and megalopolises of China may have internal morphological gaps and inversions.