Impacts of high-speed rail on domestic air cargo traffic in China

Air cargo is vital to the modern supply chain because it provides efficient and timely delivery. In the past decade, the development of high-speed rail (HSR) in China has resulted in significant impacts on air cargo traffic, which has long been neglected by the existing studies. In this research, we quantify such impacts using HSR entry dummy variables and employ a panel regression approach to capture the impacts, specifically, the impacts on air cargo volumes and flight frequencies. We conduct a case study using quarterly air cargo traffic data in China, which contains 321 city pairs and spans between January 2011 and December 2017. We separately analyze the impacts on belly-hold cargo (carried by combi or passenger aircraft) traffic and freighter cargo (carried by freighters) traffic. We first capture the general impacts on belly-hold cargo traffic and freighter cargo traffic for all city pairs. Then, to quantify the distance level impacts on belly-hold cargo traffic, we categorize city pairs into multiple groups according to their distance and apply the panel regression approach in each group. Our main results include: (1) The entry of HSR services reduces the belly-hold cargo volumes and flight frequencies by 21.9% and 19.4%, respectively; (2) The strongest impacts on belly-hold cargo volumes and flight frequencies are observed in the medium-haul group within a distance of 800–1300 km; (3) After the entry of HSR services, the cargo volumes and flight frequencies of freighter cargo generally increase by 22.3% and 20.9%, respectively; (4) The whole air cargo traffic in the measurement of cargo volumes and flight frequencies decreases after the entry of HSR, and the impacts on whole air cargo volumes are relatively smaller than the belly-hold cargo volumes in the short-haul (no more than 800 km) and long-haul (more than 1300 km) groups.