Zhenhua Chen and Meng Yu Publish Article on the Effects of High-Speed Rail

The planning professor examines the effects on agricultural land conversion since 2005.

Zhenhua Chen and Meng Yu Publish Article on the Effects of High-Speed Rail

Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning Zhenhua Chen and PhD student Meng Yu have published “Urbanization, land conversion, and arable land in Chinese cities: The ripple effects of high-speed rail” in Applied Geography.

Since 2005, Chinese transit authorities have made substantial investments in high-speed rail (HSR) infrastructure, driven by the ambition to connect all cities with over half a million people. This study estimates the impact of HSR network expansion on agricultural land conversion using a panel dataset for 171 Chinese cities that developed HSR infrastructure between 2005 and 2012. Structural equation modeling (SEM) estimation results show that HSR contributed indirectly to arable land requisition but directly to agricultural land converted for urban uses.

Read more at Applied Geography