Comment on “China's Transport Infrastructure Investment: Past, Present, and Future”

• Date: 01 July 2016
• Author: Tomoo Marukawa
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/aepr.12136
• Published date: 01 July 2016

Comment on “China’s Transport Infrastructure

Investment: Past, Present, and Future”

Tomoo MARUKAWA†

Universityof Tokyo

JEL codes: O18, R42, R48

As Qin (2016) describes in detail, China’s transport infrastructure has been developing at

breakneck speed over the past twenty years. Let us compare the speed of China’s

infrastructure development with that of Japan’s. The high-speed rail network in China,

which started operation in 2008 with a total length of 672km, has been extended to

16,000km in 2014, growing by 70% per annum. Japan’s high-speed rail system, or

shinkansen, which started operation in 1964, has developed into a nationwide network in

2015 with a total length of 2,618km. The growth rate of its length was 3% per annum.

The speed of urban transport infrastructure development in China’s major cities has also

been very fast. Beijing’s subway system, for example, which consisted of only two lines in

early 1990s, has expanded to 18 lines with a total length of 527km. Tokyo’s subway system

already had a well-developed network in 1990 with 10 lines. Only three more lines have

been added to the network since then, and its total length has reached 300km in 2015.

The length of expresswaysand high-speed rail per capita in China at the end of 2014 were

0.08m and 0.01 m, which were 124% and 58% of those in Japan, respectively. The length of

subways per capita in Beijing is 107% of that in Tokyo in 2015.

Although the development of China’s transport infrastructure has been very rapid, the

efficiencyof travel in China has not improvedwith the same speed. In August 2015,I took a

high-speed train from Guangzhou to Chaozhou. The 2-h ride on the train was more

comfortable and faster than the 6-h trip for the same route by car in 2011. However, the

total duration of the trip in 2015 was 4.5h because Guangzhou’s colossal high-speed rail

station was located far away from the city center and the procedures prior to getting on

the train were time-consuming. The efficiencyin connecting the city to the high-speed rail

is given much less consideration than the speed of the train.

In Beijing, even with the building of 16 new subway lines and three more ring roads

since the early 1990s, road traffic congestion is much severe today than it was in the early

1990s. The number of vehicles owned by Beijingers has increased by 12 times during the

period and that mustbe one of the main reasons for thecurrent traffic congestion. Atleast,

that was how Beijing municipal authorities diagnosed the problem, and therefore they

started to restrict the number of vehicle number plates issued to the public since 2011.

†Correspondence: Tomoo Marukawa, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, Hongo,

Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan.Email: marukawa@iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp

doi: 10.1111/aepr.12136 Asian EconomicPolicy Review (2016) 11, 218–219

218 ©2016Japan Center for EconomicResearch

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