The External Characteristics and Mechanism of Urban Road Corridors to Agglomeration: Case Study for Guangzhou, China

Existing research on the agglomeration effect of urban roads mainly focuses on land use but ignores the differences between various locations, types, and directions of roads. Few studies have been conducted on the built buildings which can represent the actual utility, and land use as a kind of government authorization may not necessarily represent actual needs. This research provides an analytical framework and an empirical analysis to study the differences in impacts of different urban roads on land use and to identify its internal dynamic mechanism. Guangzhou, being the research object, is one of the five major central cities in China. By using the techniques of GIS and SPSS, together with the methods of corridor effect, correlation analysis, and geographic detector, we analyze the external characteristics of office buildings and land gathering along both sides of the roads, explore the urban characteristics of corridor effect, then analyze the relationship with urban traffic flow and bus network density in order to find out the internal motivation of corridor effect. The fundamental conclusion can be drawn that the corridor effect on the land used for commercial offices is mostly unnoticeable, and roads of different locations, types, and directions display various scope and intensity of corridor effects. The agglomeration power is mainly caused by private transportation and has no relationship with public transport. The article concludes the model of the corridor effect and provides some policy suggestions to the government in order to strengthen the linkage development of transportation and land and to promote the improvement of land use efficiency.