Analyzing Spatial Characteristics of the City Network from the Perspective of Multiple Traffic Flows: Inspection of Provinces along the Silk Road Economic Belt

Passenger flows carried by high-speed railway (HSR) and aviation have become an important representation of the circulation of elements between cities. This paper selects the HSR and aviation flow data of five northwestern provinces along the silk road economic belt as the research object and compares the structure and characteristics of city networks from macro, meso, and micro perspectives. Results show that, influenced by location, the network of HSR flow exhibits gradient distribution from east to west, the network of air flow shows the properties of being sparser from west to east under the relative equilibrium structure, and the spatial structure of linkages between cities based on railway flow exhibits significant corridor effect. Aviation flow forms a barbell structure with two subgroups of geographically adjacent cities, with Xi’an and Urumqi being their cores separately. The “flow in” and “flow out” of nodes reflect the unbalanced features of attraction between cities.