The spatio-temporal relationship between land use and population distribution around new intercity railway stations: A case study on the Pearl River Delta region, China

Recently, transit-oriented development (TOD) projects have begun to prosper around new intercity railway (ICR) stations in China. An important question is whether the ICR-based TOD could perform as expected since the regional ICR is different from urban transit on which more TOD projects base. This article utilizes a remote sensing dataset, mobile-phone location-based big data as well as web map portal data and a Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regression (GTWR) model to explore the spatio-temporal relationship between land use and the population distribution in the ICR station area. It adopts the Pearl River Delta region in southern China as a study area, which undergoes rapid urbanization and is a pioneer to adopt TOD to promote the ICR project. The research finds the following. First, the combination of remote sensing, spatial big data, web map portal data and the GTWR model efficiently reveals the underlying spatio-temporal heterogeneities of the relationship between land use and population distribution in the ICR station area. Second, compared with the existing built-up area, the newly developed land after ICR construction has a weaker correlation with population distribution in the ICR station area. Third, the locations of the ICR station areas within the urban-rural system play a significant role in determining the relationship between land use and population distribution. For example, the association of working facilities with population distribution in suburban and town ICR station areas is significantly larger than that in urban and rural ICR station areas.