Roads and Routeways

Globalization as an economic activity has been made possible by the development of global transport networks. Essentially these are multimodal and may include links by air or water or rail, but they will almost always include links by road. The ultimate destinations and points of departure of transport are on land. The addresses to which freight is consigned and where travel ends are places on roads. Roads are the basic infrastructure without which other modes of transport could not function in a systematic way. The terms road and route can be used synonymously, but the term road refers to physical structures, while the term route refers to knowledge of the way from one place to another, ways that can be waterways, airways, and railways as well as roadways. Roads provide a permanent way between places. In so doing they have over time evolved into multilevel network structures that range from the global to the local level of rooms in buildings and that profoundly modify environments and the human activities in them. Routes are an abstract concept of the way from one place to another that encompasses distance and direction, the physical factors of the biosphere traversed, the social and political nature of the polities to be passed through, and the existence and costs of support services. As the physical infrastructures of the different transport modes have developed, it has become possible to think of long-distance transport in terms of alternative routes and modes. This has facilitated an economic model of transport based on multimodal supply chains, which in conjunction with [Page 1494]cheap oil, have brought about a massive expansion of world trade and transport. This is now implicated in the problem of climate change, which calls into question the paradigm of transport that has existed for some 6,000 years.