Beyond cities, railways also represent a potential strategy for
achieving more sustainable transport for medium- and long-distance
movements at the regional level. Although rail has played
an important role in China, its limited capacity has always been a
constraint for further growth. Focusing on the new technology of
high-speed rail (HSR), Nash et al. (this issue) systematically examine
whether HSR can be a solution to the historical rail capacity
problem. Their analysis, once again, points out the importance of
geographical contexts in understanding the problem. They suggest
that the rail investment policy in China should be different for different
regions, broadly defined as North, Northeast, East, Central
and South, Southwest and Northwest China. From another perspective,
Shaw et al. (this issue) examine the ways that HSR development
has transformed the spatio-temporal accessibility of cities.
Their paper suggests that the impacts were different at the four different
stages of before August 2008, between August 2008 and July
2011, August 2011 to November 2012, and between August 2012
and January 2013. Along the same line, Jiao et al. (this issue)
employ three sets of accessibility indicators in comparing the
accessibility of HSR and ground transport in over 300 cities in
China. Their work also makes projections on the changing regional
disparities in accessibility as the HSR network unfolds in the
future.