Spatial Interaction and Network Structure Evolvement of Cities in Term of China''s Railway Passenger Flow in 1990s
空间相互作用与城市关联网络演进 ——以我国20世纪90年代城际铁路客流为例

Cities seperated in space are connected together by spatial interactions (SI) between them. But the studies focusing on the SI are relatively few in China mainly because of the scarity of data. This paper deals with the SI in terms of rail passenger flows in 1990s, which is an important aspect of the network structure of urban agglomerations. By using a data set consisting of 1991 and 2000 rail O-D passenger flows between nearly 200 cities, intercity rail distance O-D matrixes, and some other indices. It is found that the attenuating tendency of rail passenger is obvious, but the gravity model cannot explain the change over time. Then a further study is carried out based on the hub-and-spoke framework under which the error of gravity model is explained. And by analysis of dominant flows and spatial structure of flows, we find that passenger flows have a trend of polarizing to hubs while the links between hubs upgrades, and some driven factors for the re-organization process of the structure of urban agglomerations are discussed.