Sustainability, Vol. 11, Pages 2237: Vulnerability Analysis of Intercity Multimode Transportation Networks; A Case Study of the Yangtze River Delta (Sustainability)

The disruption of an intercity transportation network will seriously influence the economic activities and communication between cities. At the regional or national transportation network level, in most cases, there is no link redundancy because of the high construction cost of the extra transportation infrastructure, so the impacts caused by the disruption of regional intercity transportation networks should be paid more attention. This paper proposes an accessibility-based method to analyze the vulnerability of multimode transportation networks. The measurement captures the influence of the disruption of network components in terms of the travel cost, socio-economic impacts, and level of transportation service of cities, and besides the network vulnerability analysis, it can also be used in the analysis of city relationships and development status of cities, providing a reference direction of the sustainable development for the city cluster. Finally, with the rapid application of high-speed trains in China, a preliminary study of the public transportation network of the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region is conducted to illustrate the applicability of the evaluating method. The results show that the proposed measurement can be used to analyze the transportation network from the perspective of socio-economic impacts and level of transportation service, providing a reference for network planners and managers.