## 4 Empirical Analysis
### Results Analysis and Discussion
#### 4.2.1 Evaluation of Integrated Transport Efficiency
To demonstrate the integrated efficiency of China's regional transport systems more intuitively, we took 2009, 2011, 2014 and 2016 as research years, and applied ArcGIS software to reflect the changes of _ITE_ in temporal and spatial distribution from the perspective of geographical spatial distribution. As shown in Figure 3, according to the size of the efficiency value, the _ITEs_ are divided into four intervals marked by the different colors. It can be seen that most provinces manifested a trend of improvement with regard to their transport efficiency. The high integrated transport efficiency can be found in the Eastern and Central regions, indicating that transport resources in these areas have advantages such as good geographical locations and favorable economic development conditions. In addition, changes in the distribution of _ITE_ lend themselves to the phenomenon of the super-efficient provinces shifting away from Eastern and Central areas towards Western regions. Considering the average value of _ITE_ of the 31 provinces from 2009 to 2016, we found it to be distributed in the interval [0.17, 1.25]. We then divided this average into five categories. When the _ITE_ value was over 1.0 from 2009 to 2016, this indicated that particular region belonged to the category of super-efficient. Subsequent values were divided into relatively efficient, medium-high efficient, low-medium efficient, and inefficient to highlight changes in the _ITE_ of each province during 2009-2016. Figure 4a shows the change of super _ITE_ values; Figure 4b presents the change of relatively efficient  
Figure 3: Comparison of spatial and temporal changes in _ITE_. _ITE_ value; Figure 4c expresses the change of medium-high efficient _ITE_ value; Figure 4d shows the change of low-medium efficient _ITE_ value; and Figure 4e presents the change of inefficient _ITE_ value. In this figure, we can see the changes of _ITE_ for each province during 2009-2016. In addition, by calculating the average integrated transport efficiency of these 31 provinces during 2009-2016, it was found that the highest average transport efficiency (Shanghai) was 1.08 times greater than the lowest (Tibet). We then further compared and analyzed the _ITE_ of three key economic zones of China, in line with the administrative division of the 31 provinces (Figure 5). As shown in Figure 6, the _ITE_ average of three zone shows that Eastern Zone > Central Zone > Western Zone, which is in line with the level of economic development and presence of development policies in the three regions. In general, the _ITE_ values of the Eastern, Central and Western Zone can be seen to be increasing. However, the _ITE_ of Central Zone and Western Zone have a better  
Figure 4: Changes of _ITE_ for each province. efficiency improvement trend compared to the Eastern Zone. The disparity between the Eastern Zone and Central Zone is gradually shrinking. Changes in the \(ITE\) value of the Eastern Zone indicate fluctuations during 2009-2016. The value is close to effective in 2016, which indicates that the use of transport resources in the Eastern Zone is relatively high. In the Central zone, the \(ITE\) values fell during 2009-2012 and then r0 se from 2012 to 2016, with a growth rate of 28.57% during 2012-2016. The \(ITE\) values of the Western Zone can be seen to increase during 2009-2016.