Transportation Geography

Passengers and Freight

At its most basic level, transportation geography is concerned with the movement of people and goods. With respect to the former, this includes the travel choices and constraints of individuals over long and short distances: how mode choice, trip length, and destination are constrained or enabled by the available networks. With respect to the latter, the movement of people and goods includes the choice of mode and route with an eye toward minimizing cost. With respect to both, it includes the broader social and economic contexts, including cost as a decision factor, as well as the impacts on land use.

The main focus of transportation geography is on the movement of people, ranging across modes and scales. Much early work focused on the policy implications of suburbanizing metropolises, later evolving into a significant literature on excess commuting that tried to explain the long average distances between home and work. Long-distance and international travel have also been key areas of study, from tourism and migration to more recent work that uses flights or passengers as a proxy for connections between world cities in a global network. New cultural and social approaches explore the consumption of transportation in terms of the symbolic meanings of vehicles and of motion itself.

Research on the geography of freight transportation has evolved along with the industry. The early focus was on freight rates, linear programming, and the “transportation problem” from economics, in keeping with the regulated nature of freight transportation in the mid 20th century. Connections between freight transportation and land use focused on cities as historical break-of-bulk points, with general conceptual models describing evolving relations between colonial [Page 2873]cities and their home ports, the relations among colonial cities, and the relations between ports and their surrounding cities. As the industry deregulated and became more entwined with globalizing economic activity, the research focus shifted to containerization, logistics, and the ensuing changes in all transport modes. More recent approaches include global commodity chains, logistics and supply chain management, and the new landscapes of distribution centers and intermodal terminals.

...