Public and private transportation in Chinese cities: impacts of population size, city wealth, urban typology, the built environment, and fuel price

The development of urban transportation is affected by city population size, wealth, urban typology, the built environment, and fuel price, and has significant implications for urban sustainability. We analyze data of 297 Chinese cities between 2017 and 2019 using both simple regressions to examine the relationships between metrics of public and private transportation and city size, and multiple regressions to examine the impacts of the above urban factors on public transit use and private vehicle number. Both public transit use and private vehicle number scale super-linearly with population and sub-linearly with gross regional product. We find that the impacts of population size, city wealth, the built environment, and fuel price on transportation vary across city groups (industrial, mixed-economy, and commercial cities). We find that the relationships between urban transportation metrics and their factors extracted from intra-city variations over time are different from those derived from pooling data of multiple cities over time, indicating the importance of choosing appropriate analyses to inform local policymaking. A key finding is that to reduce private vehicle ownership, enhancing land use diversity, increasing rail transit, and expanding taxi fleets are more effective than increasing density in already dense Chinese cities. Our findings improve understanding of the drivers of public and private transportation in urban China which are needed to promote sustainable growth of Chinese cities.