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usc Refereed/Peer-reviewed This study develops a Connectivity Utility Model that can be used to assess the connectivity of an airport, a train station, a city or a region in multi-modal transport networks involving multiple quality dimensions of transport services. This new connectivity measure considers both direct connections, and single- and multi-modal indirect connections. A novel feature of our model is the use of various radiation functions that not only help aggregate the overall connectivity of different transport modes' terminals in a city, but also capture their contribution to neighbouring cities' connectivity. This makes it possible to assess a region's or a country's overall transport connectivity. The methodology of this model is illustrated using the 2016 Chinese air and rail schedule data. The high concentration in transport services at large cities suggests that there exists a certain degree of inertia in the overall geography of China's transport infrastructure.

usc Refereed/Peer-reviewed This study calculates the connectivity of 69 Chinese airports and identifies the underlying drivers of the variation in airport connectivity over a period 2005–2016. Our connectivity model incorporates multiple discount factors including capacity and velocity penalties to correct for the quality of a connection. We find that Chinese airports experienced a great increase in air connectivity over the study period. Beijing Capital, Shanghai Pudong and Guangzhou Baiyun are far ahead of other airports in terms of overall connectivity and especially so in terms of international connectivity. However, the growth of some tourism cities and small cities has been stagnant and they suffered losses of connectivity at times. Airport competition measured by HHI, average fare, investment in local city’s fixed asset investment and airport facilities, macroeconomic conditions, and population are found to be closely associated with an airport’s connectivity. We also find that the presence of low-cost carriers is conducive for air connectivity, while HSR has the effect of decreasing airport connectivity.

Refereed/Peer-reviewed This paper proposes a dynamic weighted model to measure the connectivity of intercity passenger transportation in China. We consider both quality and quantity of the connections of two transport modes: air and rail. Among the 23 major cities selected, Shanghai is revealed to have the highest connectivity level, leading in both air and rail connectivity. Hong Kong, Kunming, and Urumqi are the three cities that predominantly rely on air transportation whose contribution to the connectivity exceeds 80%. This research also suggests that the connections between international cities and China's domestic network are highly concentrated on a few cities, namely, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and Guangzhou, and that Seoul is the best connected international city in terms of its transport links with China. Shanghai-Nanjing has been found to be the best-connected city pair, primarily due to the significant contribution from high-speed rail (HSR) service. Our study shows that the contribution from train service is more than 80% for 19 of the 20 top-ranking domestic routes measured by connectivity. In addition, HSR has become a preferred and dominant option over air on a number of long-distance routes up to 1,300km. This finding has significant policy implications for transportation infrastructure planning and investment. usc