Transportation Studies

This field studies the movement of people and goods via alternate modes of transport, such as road, rail, water, and airways. It analyzes the transport system that facilitates the movement of commodities and its relationship with various dimensions of economic development such as economic growth, industry location, land use, sprawl, energy, pollution, and climate change. It is like any other factor of production and, hence, there is demand and supply of transport.

The means of transport provides a vital link among production centers, suppliers, and market areas. Transport is a derived demand and improvements in it are expected to be followed by economic development. It plays an important role in economic development by providing a unifying and integrating influence upon the economy.

This field is interdisciplinary, and has had a long-term symbiotic relationship with the disciplines of civil engineering and economics, thereby embracing the quantitative approach to build mathematical transport models. Further, it has been influenced by other cognate disciplines such as transport logistics, planning, geography, and geographical information systems (GIS).

Transport geographers study the spatial patterns of transport networks and nodes and how this eases the friction of distance, thereby shaping land use and settlement systems. During the 1950s, the advent of the interstate highway system in the United States connected cities and towns, made some places more accessible, and led to the demise of other locations.

North American geographers during the 1960s heralded the building of highways with quantitative modeling and applications to understand the spatial aspects of transport. The field received considerable impetus from the federal government in the 1970s because of its interest in regional transport policy issues such as railroad reorganization and abandonment, intercity bus deregulation, airline passenger transport deregulation, motor carrier deregulation, and energy and environmental problems related to transportation.