Land Change Pattern in High-Speed Rail Station Area: Empirical Research on Yangtze River Delta Region in China from 2010 to 2020

The opening of high-speed rail (HSR) has led to land cover changes within cities or in areas adjacent to HSR stations, but these changes vary between different HSR stations. Many local governments in China have planned larger-scale HSR new cities around the station, but not all of them have been realized. Existing studies on China’s HSR have mainly focused on the spatial scale of urban agglomerations and above, with less discussion of the built environment at the intra-city scale, and even less interaction studies based on a period of time span. This study takes 40 stations along the four major and earlier-opened HSR lines in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration Region in China as examples, constructs two indexes of land cover scale and compactness level to measure the land change pattern in the station catchment area over a 10-year period from 2010 to 2020, and uses statistical analyses to explore the potential factors influencing such changes. The findings are as follows: (1) HSR promotes the incremental built-up land in the station area to accumulate adjacent to the stations; (2) HSR stations located at the edge or periphery of the city, or newly-built rather than upgraded stations, tend to have larger incremental land cover scale and compactness level, but newly-built HSR stations may also lead to loose spatial layout of the station areas. This study analyzes the impacts and potential factors of HSR stations on land change pattern in the station area over a 10-year time series, providing an empirical basis for future location selection of HSR stations, the urban function arranging in station areas, and the promotion of transit-oriented development in the station area.