Telecoupling mechanism of urban land expansion based on transportation accessibility: A case study of transitional Yangtze River economic Belt, China

Several studies have explored the drivers of urban land expansion (ULE), but disregarded the influence of distant spatial effect on ULE at a large regional scale. This study contributed to a tele-coupling relationship framework between spatial spillover of ULE and transportation accessibility to find the influence of distance spatial effect on ULE. Drawing upon land-use remote sensing data from 1990–2015 and transportation network data, this study assessed the relationship between transportation accessibility and ULE, and developed a second-order spatial autoregressive model (SO-SAR) to explore the spatial spillover mechanism of ULE in the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB). The results find that ULE exhibits a significantly positive spatial correlation when the connection criterion of accessibility is 2 h≤hour≤3 h. The SO-SAR model results show that ULE is affected by the historical ULE, which presents a significant path-dependence effect. Moreover, the ULE in most local cities has a weak inhibition on the ULE of the surrounding cities where the connection criterion of accessibility is 1 h. However, the spillover effects of remote city’s ULE have a slight positive impact on local ULE due to the improvement of traffic accessibility from 2005 to 2015. In addition, openness, labor flows, institutional hierarchy, and economic structure had a significantly positive effect on ULE during the period 1990–2015 in the YREB. Policy reforms are suggested to encourage the development of integrated transportation and urban land use at a large regional scale in China. Moreover, there is a need for a mindset shift from cities competing competition over land to cooperation between the cities in YREB.