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The nation's development map cannot be redrawn

`The uneven development between northern and southern Taiwan is a natural phenomenon that will be difficult to break.'

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
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