Modelling impacts of high-speed rail on urban interaction with social media in China’s mainland

High-Speed Rail (HSR) has increasingly become an important mode of inter-city transportation between large cities. Inter-city interaction facilitated by HSR tends to play a more prominent role in promoting urban and regional economic integration and development. Quantifying the impact of HSR’s interaction on cities and people is therefore crucial for long-term urban and regional development planning and policy making. We develop an evaluation framework using toponym information from social media as a proxy to estimate the dynamics of such impact. This paper adopts two types of spatial information: toponyms from social media posts, and the geographical location information embedded in social media posts. The framework highlights the asymmetric nature of social interaction among cities, and proposes a series of metrics to quantify such impact from multiple perspectives – including interaction strength, spatial decay, and channel effect. The results show that HSRs not only greatly expand the uneven distribution of inter-city connections, but also significantly reshape the interactions that occur along HSR routes through the channel effect.