Why Does Traveling Between Chinese Cities by High-Speed Rail Feel More and More Like Taking the Metro?

If someone needs to travel from Shanghai to Suzhou for a morning meeting, many Chinese people will not first check flights or consider staying overnight. They will open a railway ticketing app and see which trains are available that day. Similar choices are common between Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Beijing and Tianjin, and Nanjing and Hangzhou. The departure point and destination clearly belong to different cities, and the trip may even cross a provincial boundary, but psychologically the journey has begun to feel like a longer urban commute.

Saying that taking high-speed rail is like taking the metro does not mean the two transport systems are actually the same. High-speed rail requires real-name ticketing and assigns passengers to a specific train and seat; travelers must also pass security and ticket checks. A metro normally allows people to arrive and board, without the advance sales and limited seat inventory of intercity trains. What the comparison really describes is that high-speed rail has become frequent, reliable and routine enough in some densely populated areas for Chinese people to begin understanding the distance between cities on the same scale as transport within a city.

Distance Is Changed by More Than Speed

When foreign readers try to understand China’s high-speed rail, the first thing they often notice is its maximum speed. Fuxing trains can operate at 350 kilometers per hour. That certainly matters, but speed alone is not enough to turn long-distance transport into part of everyday life. What truly changes travel habits is the combination of speed, network coverage, service frequency and station connections.

By 2024, China had more than 160,000 kilometers of operating railway lines, including over 46,000 kilometers of high-speed rail. More than 3,300 passenger railway stations were in service, over 1,300 of them high-speed rail stations. This does not mean that every Chinese city has equally dense high-speed rail service. It does show, however, that high-speed rail is no longer a collection of isolated routes linking only a few major cities, but a nationwide network whose lines can be used in combination.

Frequent departures further reduce the distance Chinese people feel. On most Chinese high-speed rail routes, trains run continuously from morning until late at night. If passengers miss one train, they can usually switch to the next departure that day.

This experience is very different from air travel. A plane is faster, but travel time must also include getting to the airport, completing formalities and waiting to board. High-speed rail stations are often closer to built-up urban areas and can connect with metro lines, buses and taxis. The speed of the train, combined with shorter connections at both ends, makes rail journeys of three or four hours highly competitive on many routes.

When Intercity Travel Enters an Ordinary Chinese Person’s Schedule

Whether a form of transport truly changes daily life cannot be judged only by the length of its routes. It also depends on how many Chinese people are willing to use it continually. In the first eleven months of 2024, China’s railways carried 4.008 billion passenger journeys, a record for the same period at the time. This figure includes both high-speed and conventional rail and cannot be treated as high-speed rail traffic alone. Nevertheless, high-speed rail had already taken on a rapidly growing share of railway travel. In 2017, it carried 56 percent of the 8.3 million daily passengers using China’s non-urban rail system.

The passengers are not only tourists. In a survey conducted on the Tianjin–Jinan and Changchun–Jilin routes, business trips accounted for 62 percent and 45 percent of the journeys surveyed, respectively. The Changchun–Jilin high-speed railway is about 110 kilometers long. At the time, it operated 45 pairs of trains a day, and 97 percent of the surveyed journeys were shorter than 300 kilometers. A line like this functions more like regional transport than a traditional long-distance journey.

When neighboring cities have reliable and frequent services, Chinese people can arrange work, medical treatment, study, family visits and weekend leisure in another city. The hiring and service areas of companies are no longer constrained as strictly by administrative borders. This change is often called the “same-city effect.” In regions such as Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta and the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area, shorter travel times make it easier for people, goods, capital and information to move.

“Same city” is still an economic and everyday-life description. Shanghai and Suzhou do not become one city because of high-speed rail, and Beijing and Tianjin continue to have different housing markets, public services and administrative rules. But when an intercity trip can be fitted reliably into one day, Chinese people no longer ask only, “Which city is it in?” They also ask, “How long will it take me to get there?”

Why This Feeling Does Not Apply Everywhere

The experience of high-speed rail as everyday transport depends heavily on the route and the time of travel. Corridors with strong passenger demand, such as Beijing–Shanghai, the Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta, can support frequent services. Routes through less populated areas or over longer distances may not offer the same frequency. Lines with heavy traffic can more readily support operating, maintenance and construction costs, while routes with lower passenger density face greater financial pressure.

Public holidays also change the impression that a ticket is always available. Tickets during the Spring Festival, the National Day holiday and popular weekends may sell out quickly. High-speed rail uses real-name tickets for specified trains, so passengers cannot arrive at a station and decide which service to take as they would on a metro. Large Chinese cities often have several railway stations. Going to Beijing South instead of another Beijing station, or confusing Shanghai Hongqiao with another Shanghai station, can turn a relaxed plan into a stressful one.

Station locations also vary. Some high-speed rail stations are well inside the city and directly connected to the metro, while some newer stations lie on the urban outskirts, with a substantial journey still required after leaving the train. Comparing only the train’s running time can overstate the convenience that high-speed rail provides.

“Like taking the metro” applies only to regions with mature networks and frequent services. High-speed rail has not removed the costs of security checks, waiting, transfers and ticket purchases, but it has changed how Chinese people judge distance. A journey of several hundred kilometers may still require advance planning, or it may fit into a same-day return trip. For many Chinese people, whether they can complete a meeting, a medical visit or a dinner within one day has become more useful than the number of kilometers on a map.

References

- High-Speed Railways in China: A Look at Traffic (World Bank, 2014) - China's High-Speed Rail Development (World Bank, 2019) - Railway Passenger Traffic Soars in Volume and Quality, “Mobile China” Full of Vitality (China State Railway Group, 2024)