Spatial Pattern of Highway Transport Dominance in Qinghai–Tibet Plateau at the County Scale

Abstract

The highway is an important mode of transportation in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, and can be regarded as a major contributor to the high-quality and sustainable development of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. It is of great significance to explore its spatial distribution and characteristics for understanding the regional and geographical process. Although Qinghai–Tibet Plateau’s highway transportation infrastructure has been experiencing rapid development in recent years, there lacks a systematic examination of the whole Qinghai–Tibet Plateau from the perspective of supportive capacity for its socio-economic activities. This paper applies geospatial analysis methods, such as network analysis, spatial statistics, and weighted overlay, to model the highway transport dominance in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau in 2015 at the county scale and reveals the basic characteristics of the highway transport dominance’s spatial pattern. The results are mainly of four aspects: 1) there is a significant difference between the east and west of the highway in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau, showing an irregular circle structure of gradual attenuation from the east to west; 2) at the county scale, the highway transport dominance in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau shows strong spatial autocorrelation and a certain extent of spatial heterogeneity, presenting a spatial distribution pattern of High–High and Low–Low clustering; 3) the urban locations of Lhasa, Xining and other center cities have obvious spatial constraints on the distribution of highway transport dominance and generally have a logarithmic decline trend; and 4) there are obvious differences in distribution among the three Urban Agglomerations in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Due to the influence of traffic location, topography, construction of national trunk lines, and level of socio-economic development., the traffic conditions of Lan-Xi Urban Agglomeration and Lhasa Urban Agglomeration are better than Kashgar Urban Agglomeration. This study can be used to guide the optimization of the highway network structure and provide a macro decision-making reference for the planning and evaluation of major highway projects in the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau.