Spatial-temporal characteristics of China’s high-speed rail transport network

"Medium and Long Term Railway Network Planning" describes the grand blueprint of "eight vertical and eight horizontal" high-speed railway network, marking that China has officially entered the heyday of high-speed railway construction. At present, China is in a leading position in the development of high-speed railway in the world. This research selects China’s high-speed railway transport network from 2014 to 2020 as the research object, high-speed railway stations as network nodes, the ratio of passenger flow to running time as the edge weight, and builds a weighted undirected network diagram. Gephi is used to visualize the high-speed railway transport network. Finally, the spatio-temporal variation rules of China’s high-speed railway transport network are explored from two aspects of nodes and the whole network. It is found that the difference of different node degrees will gradually change from large in the early stage to small in 2020. Small world features are becoming more and more prominent, and network performance is improving. China’s high-speed rail network was initially developed mainly in the economically developed central and eastern regions, but has gradually shifted to the western region since 2017. China’s high-speed rail transport network has shifted from economically developed, densely populated areas to underdeveloped, sparsely populated areas with transportation demands.