Environmental risk perception and public trust—from planning to operation for China's high-speed railway

ABSTRACT

China has the world's largest high-speed railway (HSR) network, but while HSR is meeting high transportation demand, the Decide-Announce-Defend approach to infrastructure policy and projects still prevails in China and is often criticized for not addressing public concerns of environmental and social risks. In recent years, researchers have investigated the economic and environmental impacts of HSR, yet few studies have evaluated the public's views on HSR risks or their views on the trustworthiness of key information sources, which are believed to be critical in predicting public behavior and reaction to infrastructure projects. Using random survey data from communities along the Beijing-Shenyang and Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway lines, our study shows that perceived risks of HSR are higher in the operating stage rather than during construction. We also find that in the construction stage, risk-related information is often obtained through informal channels, while the government becomes a more trusted information provider only after HSR goes into operation. Furthermore, we confirm that the public's perception of the level of knowledge, transparency, and attention to risk of the information sources¹

¹ These are broad terms used in the survey to refer to information sources' general level of environmental knowledge, level of transparency with the decision-making process and information disclosure, and level of concern for environmental risks perceived by the public.

are key determinants of their perceived trustworthiness. Lastly, this study reveals that socioeconomic characteristics are more important than project phase in explaining the regional differences in risk perception and trustworthiness of key information sources. This key finding calls for a strategy of stakeholder engagement that is carefully tailored to the demographics of the affected population in the decision-making and implementation process of HSR, as well as other infrastructure projects.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• environment
• high-speed railway
• public trust
• risk perception

Acknowledgments

The authors would like acknowledge Satyajit Bose and Kelsie DeFrancia for valuable comments and edits of the manuscript. They would also like to thank the very constructive comments from three anonymous referees. All errors are our own.

Funding

We are very grateful to the Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management at the Earth Institute at Columbia University for supporting the research underlying this paper.

Notes

¹ These are broad terms used in the survey to refer to information sources' general level of environmental knowledge, level of transparency with the decision-making process and information disclosure, and level of concern for environmental risks perceived by the public.

² Though the definition varies across countries, HSR generally refers to rail lines with an average speed greater than 250 km/h (International Union of Railways [UIC], 2014). In China, speeds from 200 to 250 km/h qualify as HSR (The State Council of the People's Republic of China, 2013).

³ Medium distance is classified as around 1000 km and less than 5 h of traveling time.

⁴ NIMBYism describes situations where support for a given project is high as long as it is not their backyard. He, Mol, and Lu (2016) seems to make the case for HSR, but there are studies that point to the opposite direction, namely that the opposition decreases with proximity to the project site, as least for renewable energy projects, such as wind power (Wustenhagen, Wolsink, & Burer, 2007).

⁵ See (Wustenhagen et al., 2007) for a survey of relevant studies.

⁶ For example, it is estimated that a US$ 1 billion investment in HSR construction creates 24,000 jobs and generates US$ 4 billion in economic output in the USA (American Public Transportation Association, 2015).

⁷ Technical risk refers to potential impact multiplied by its likelihood.

⁸ A chi-square test with a test statistic of 52.42 (p < 0.0001) supports the same conclusion.

⁹ Respondents had the option of selecting more than one information channel.

¹⁰ It is worth noting that factors identified by survey participants as important can be different from the real key factors of their “overall” risk concerns. For example, de Oña, de Oña, Eboli, and Mazzulla (2015) finds that although passengers may identify safety as the most important factor of the railway service quality, the real key factors of passengers' overall satisfaction identified through a CART (classification and regression tree) model are regularity, punctuality, and the cleanliness of the vehicle.