Transportation geography

Transportation geography, or transport geography, is a branch of human geography that studies the movement of people, things, and ideas. It interprets spatial transportation on the Earth’s surface by recognizing patterns in origin, destination, and route locations; what is transported and why; and constraints on transport. It is most often used in connection with regional and urban planning, while relating to economic geography and cultural identity. Key concepts include supply and demand, distance, and space. Many transportation geographers conceptualize the field at its most basic as an equation involving the effort needed to move a given volume over a given distance while dealing with various factors causing friction.

Overview

Movement is essential to the well-being of a society, and transportation geography attempts to study transportation systems on various scales in order to understand the ways humans groups interact with one another. Forms of transportation range from individual means, such as walking, bicycling, or driving, to mass shipping methods, such as trucking, railways, and air or sea cargo, to specialized systems such as public transit, online communication, and global finance. Such processes have shaped societies and the built environment throughout history, and continue to do so in the contemporary world. While scholars have long recognized the importance of these ideas, transportation geography only developed as a distinct academic discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with geography as a whole.

The main forms of transportation in the traditional, physical sense are water, road, rail, and air. Transportation geographers give each its own value in terms of speed and friction depending on the origin and destination, taking into account how efficient each form of movement is. For example, ships can move large volumes over long distances at relatively low cost, but they are slow and constrained to navigable waterways. Aircraft, on the other hand, are the fastest method of travel and can reach almost anywhere, but are expensive to operate, require significant infrastructure and regulation, and carry relatively little volume. Therefore, a business executive needing to reach a distant meeting would choose a plane over a ship, while someone needing to ship large amounts of scrap metal would prefer water shipping. Transportation geography allows for analysis of much more complex situations, enabling maximum efficiency across vast networks of global movement.

Part of the study of transportation geography is recognizing that all water, land, and air modes of transportation are interconnected, and global systems rely on many seemingly disparate elements operating smoothly. Yet individual transportation systems are also considered on their own, both in order to better understand how they work and to keep variables from one system from impacting planning of another. For example, while passenger and freight rail transportation share many similarities, there are significant differences that must be taken into account in both historical analysis and planning efforts. Likewise, passenger automobiles and trucking use the same infrastructure, but failing to recognize or plan for their differences can cause unnecessary friction, such as traffic jams.

New developments in technology have greatly affected how people, goods, and ideas are transported and at what speed, making transportation geography a constantly changing subject. Trends in postmodernism and postindustrialism have strongly influenced the field. With ongoing global population growth and migration, studying settlement patterns and their impact on economies is a major area of interest. Perhaps most importantly, the Internet has radically increased the speed with which ideas travel around the world; geographers seek to understand how transportation across virtual spaces affects society, as well as how such developments have affected traditional modes of transport.

Bibliography

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Hanson, Susan, and Genevieve Giuliano. The Geography of Urban Transportation. New York: Guilford, 2004. Print.

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Hoyle, Brian S., and Richard D. Knowles. Modern Transport Geography. 2nd ed. Hoboken: Wiley, 1998. Print.

Keeling, David J. "Transportation Geography: New Directions on Well-Worn Trails." Progress in Human Geography 31.2 (2007): 217–225. Print.

Rodrigue, Jean-Paul, Claude Comtois, and Brian Slack. The Geography of Transport Systems. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Thomas, Isabelle. Transportation Networks and the Optimal Location of Human Activities: A Numerical Geography Approach. Northampton: Elgar, 2002. Print.

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