Urban Planning and Traffic Regulation Policies in Chinese Metropolitan Areas
Researchers from the MIT Energy Initiative's Mobility Systems Center, led by Joanna Moody and Jinhua Zhao, have conducted a comprehensive study on transportation policymaking in Chinese cities over the past three years. The team's findings, published recently, provide valuable insights into the transportation priorities of cities with varying levels of urbanization and motorization.
The researchers grouped 287 Chinese cities into four clusters based on their urbanization and motorization histories using a clustering algorithm. The clusters are as follows:
- Cluster 1: Consisting of 23 large, dense, wealthy megacities with urban rail systems. These cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, are focusing on connecting their urban rail systems with other transportation modes, like buses or walking infrastructure, and planning transit-oriented urban development.
- Cluster 2: Comprising 41 wealthy cities without urban rail. These cities, like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, are currently building urban rail systems but are not yet thinking about other policies that come with rail development, such as multi-modality and transit-oriented development. They could learn from Cluster 1 cities about factors to consider at the outset.
- Cluster 3: Made up of 66 medium-sized cities with lower urbanization levels. These cities, like Chongqing and Chengdu, tend to prioritize policies around electrifying buses and improving and expanding bus service, as they have no rail networks.
- Cluster 4: Including 57 smaller cities with the lowest urbanization and motorization levels. Cities in this cluster, like Yinchuan and Xi'an, focus on road development, particularly on connecting the urban core to rural areas and adjacent cities, to expand opportunities for their populations.
The researchers manually labeled each text segment with one of 21 policy types and created a spreadsheet organizing the cities into the four clusters. They then selected 44 cities at random for analysis, ensuring that at least 10% of cities from each cluster were represented. The researchers downloaded the 2017 mayoral reports from the 44 selected cities and performed keyword searches to identify transportation-oriented sections.
The researchers' analysis supports their initial hypothesis that different urbanization and motorization trends are reflected in very different transportation priorities. The team views their study as a "proof of concept" for performing transportation policy studies using a mixed-method approach, combining mathematical analysis of time series data with in-depth review of city government reports to identify transportation policy priorities.
This study is significant as it fills a gap in the literature by focusing on small- and medium-sized cities, which have often been overlooked in previous studies. The researchers also propose an alternative framework for policy-learning in which cities that share common urbanization and motorization histories would share their policy knowledge.
More information about the study can be found at energy.mit.edu/research/mobilityofthefuture.
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