Characterizing broken links on national and local expressways in Chinese city-regions

ABSTRACT

While massive resources have been invested in China to improve intercity connectivity and boost economic growth, many short segments of planned but unfinished expressways exist in China’s city-regions. Such broken or missing links have been observed in Europe, the United States and, more recently, China. This study provides an exploratory analysis of broken links in both national and local expressways in China. Specifically, it develops a procedure to identify short expressway links that have been planned but unfinished, and associates the presence of broken links in individual cities with a number of socioeconomic, geographical and political factors.

KEYWORDS:

• expressway
• city-regions
• regional transport
• China

JEL:

• P21
• R58

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sincere thanks to Yi Li and Wangtu Xu for comments made on earlier versions of this paper, as well as to Xiuxin Ma, Nannan Wang and Wei Qiang for research support. The author is also very grateful for the insightful comments and suggestions made by the editor and anonymous reviewers. All remaining errors are the author's own. The usual disclaimers apply.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Xingjian Liu http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4158-3655

Additional information

Funding

The author is thankful for the financial support from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council General Research Fund [grant number 17600918]; the Hong Kong Strategic Public Policy Research (SPPR) Funding Scheme [grant number S2017.A8.007.17S]; and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41501177].