The High speed rail started running on Friday. What will be its impact on the nation's urban and rural development?
Many railway experts are optimistic and believe the high speed rail will help promote balanced urban and rural development and the competitiveness of all Taiwanese cities.
However, just as when the construction of the Sun Yat-sen National Freeway was completed in 1978, the high speed railway will only serve to balance population distribution in cities along the rail line. As for urbanization, the new rail system may not have much of an impact.
A look at a statistics on population sizes in the nation's different townships and cities over the past three decades reveals two things.
First of all, urban polarization is getting more serious, which indicates a widening gap between urban and rural areas.
Secondly, the population distribution in Taiwan displays "power law scaling." Power laws can be observed in the development of matters where scale and frequency stand in an inverse relationship -- the larger the scale, the smaller the frequency.
For example, an earthquake measuring more than seven on the Richter scale is a rare phenomenon, whereas earthquakes measuring four or below occur quite often. If we plot earthquake magnitude on a horizontal axis and frequency on a vertical axis, the distribution will describe a straight line.
The population distribution of the nation's cities also conforms to these power laws. If we plot population distribution and size, we get a straight line. By comparing the population distribution in cities along the Sun Yat-sen National Freeway with cities not along the freeway, we find that the urbanization trend along the freeway is weakening.
Based on this analysis, it becomes possible to predict that the new railway will only increase the population distribution of populations along the railway line.
But this will not solve the uneven urbanization trends. The only reason for this is that factors resulting from past urban development have made industry choose northern Taiwan as its favored location, and it will be difficult to implement a policy which can change that.
The statistical modeling of the distribution of those companies -- by dividing them into northern, central, southern and eastern regions -- reveals that metropolitan Taipei has long been the first choice for company headquarters. Whether we like it or not, as long as the conditions remain unchanged, companies will continue to focus on northern Taiwan in the present and the future, as it has done in the past.
Judging from the way industry has locked in on the north and the law of urban distribu-tion, the uneven development between northern and southern Taiwan is a natural phenomenon that will be difficult to break. The high speed railway is no exception.
Lai Shih-kung is a professor and director of the Cities, Complexity and Planning Lab at National Taipei University.
Translated by Lin Ya-ti
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry