Performance Evaluation Of High-speed Railway Passenger Hubs From Multi-functional Perspectives

The high-speed railway passenger hub is not only the key connection point in the highspeed railway transportation network,but also an important link and bridge between the highspeed railway and the cities.Step into the new era of integrated development of city and station,high-speed rail passenger hub not only serve as traffic node,but also play an important role in expanding urban development space,optimizing urban layout,and promoting urban economic development,becoming a new engine and driving force for urban development to improve quality and efficiency.During the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan" period,China’s high-speed railway passenger hub construction has developed rapidly,and a number of high-speed rail passenger hubs with consummate design that meet the needs of the times have emerged,such as Hangzhouxi Railway Station and Guangzhou Baiyun Railway Station.However,there are some problems behind the rapid development of the high-speed rail passenger hub,mainly in the following two aspects: First,the overall operation efficiency of the high-speed rail passenger hubs is low.As a huge and complex system,the high-speed railway passenger hub involves many different departments in its planning,design,construction,operation and management,etc.Therefore,the coordination of practical problems is difficult,which may easily lead to the unsuitable distribution network of the hub and the inconsistency between various modes of transportation in hub.Moreover,it is difficult to guarantee the rationality of the relevant resources input.Second,the level of linkage development between the high-speed rail passenger hub and its surrounding areas is not high.China has a vast territory and the development of different regions and cities is quite different.Uncertain factors such as the economy and policy environments,planning and design schemes make it difficult to ensure the effective connection between the high-speed railway passenger hub and the city,and hub’s role in driving surrounding areas’ development and promoting integrated development of hub and city has not yet been achieved.The land development policies of high-speed rail passenger hub and its surrounding areas need to be deepened.In addition,the relevant national policies indicate that it is necessary to build a complete modern transportation system,promote the improvement of transportation quality and efficiency,and build the modern comprehensive passenger transport hub.Entering the new era,the high-speed railway passenger hub tends to be more intelligent,more efficient and greener.In this context,it is very important to study the hub’s performance evaluation to have knowledge of the development status of different highspeed railway passenger hubs,such as how the performance of high-speed railway passenger hubs is under the differentiated environments,and whether the allocation of various resources of hubs is reasonable.This paper studies the performance of high-speed railway passenger hub from multifunctional perspectives and main research contents are as follows.(1)The paper first puts forward the theoretical basis of performance evaluation of highspeed railway passenger hub from multi-functional perspectives.Firstly,it introduces the theories of performance and efficiency.Secondly,it defines the connotation and basic functions of high-speed railway passenger hub,including traffic function and urban function.Meanwhile,it respectively analyzes the development characteristics of the functions of high-speed rail passenger transport hub.(2)The performance evaluation index system of high-speed rail passenger hub from the perspectives of multi-function is constructed.Based on the logical model,the performance evaluation model of high-speed railway passenger hub is built.Guided by the performance evaluation model,this paper further analyzes the "performance" production process of traffic function and urban function of high-speed railway passenger hub,that is,the input-output evaluation models of traffic function and urban function,and constructs the evaluation index system of traffic function and urban function of high-speed railway passenger hub respectively in combination with the construction principle of evaluating index system.(3)An improved method of SBM series model integrating K-means clustering is proposed.The evaluation and research object of this paper is the high-speed railway passenger hubs in different cities.Considering the interference of different external environment and the differences between high-speed railway passenger hubs on the evaluation results,the existing SBM series evaluation models are not adaptive to a certain extent.In order to further alleviate the influence of heterogeneity factors on the evaluation results,through the analysis of the basic principles of SBM series evaluation models,an improved method of constructing SBM series models integrating K-means clustering is proposed to improve the robustness of the evaluation results.The new method classifies the decision-making units with the same or similar attributes into the same class by clustering,and obtains the effective frontier composed of the same kind of effective decision-making units,so as to adjust the projection distance between the evaluated decision-making units and the effective frontier.A small example is used to verify the effectiveness of the improved method.(4)Finally,we obtained the results of performance of high-speed railway passenger hubs.Using the constructed evaluation index system and improved evaluation method,empirical performance evaluation is conducted by collecting the data of 32 high-speed railway integrated passenger transport hubs in China.Based on the Node-Place model,a comprehensive evaluation model of high-speed rail passenger hubs is constructed to explore the actual development status of different high-speed railway passenger hubs.This paper constructs the basic evaluation framework of the performance of high-speed rail passenger transport hubs from three aspects: theoretical basis,evaluation index system and evaluation method,and makes an empirical analysis on the performance of 32 high-speed rail passenger transport hubs in China under this framework.The traffic function evaluation results show that among the busiest 32 high-speed railway passenger hubs across the country,21 highspeed rail passenger hubs with comprehensive efficiency value of traffic function more than 1,accounting for 65%,of which Shenzhenbei Railway Station has the highest comprehensive efficiency value 1.537,followed by Nanjing Railway Station,reaching 1.274,while Foshanxi Railway Station ranks last with just 0.238.In terms of pure technical efficiency,there are 28high-speed rail passenger hubs with pure technical efficiency of traffic functions that account for 88%,indicating that the operation and management of major large-scale high-speed rail passenger hubs in China make a good performance,and can make full use of relevant resources to achieve efficient passenger distribution and transfer.From the perspective of scale efficiency,there are 19 high-speed rail passenger hubs with a scale efficiency above 0.9 for traffic function,accounting for 59%,indicating that the resources input scale of major large-scale high-speed rail passenger hubs in China is reasonable,but there is still much room for improvement.Meanwhile,the influence of the three factors of urban economy,population and urbanization on the traffic function of the high-speed rail passenger hub is analyzed.It can be concluded that population and economy are the main influencing factors,and have a positive impact on the development of the traffic function of high-speed rail passenger hub.The urban function evaluation results show that the high-speed rail passenger transport hubs with effective urban functions account for more than 93%,and the urban function efficiency of Yiwu Railway Station,Lanzhouxi Railway Station and Foshanxi Railway Station ranks the highest among all high-speed rail passenger hubs.It indicates that the urban function of has developed well,and its development has well driven the growth and development of the surrounding areas.The high-speed rail passenger hub can reasonably integrate its own development with the urban development.The comprehensive evaluation results show that among the 32 large-scale highspeed railway passenger hubs,there are mainly the types of high-efficiency and non-balanced(poor traffic function performance)as defined here,of which 18 are high-efficiency high-speed rail passenger hubs and non-balanced(poor traffic function performance)ones 12,accounting for 56% and 38% respectively.Therefore,the overall performance of the major high-speed railway passenger hubs in the country is good,while the performance of traffic function is underperformed compared with urban function.Therefore,at this stage,it is necessary to focus on improving the traffic function performance of high-speed rail passenger transport hubs in China.Besides,it also analyzes the high-speed railway passenger hubs with poor performance,and puts forward improvement suggestions suitable for themselves.Performance evaluation is an important issue in the operation and management of highspeed railway passenger hub.The research content of this paper can provide some supplement to the performance evaluation theory of high-speed railway passenger hub and provide some theoretical reference for practitioners in related fields.