Transportation Systems

Definitions

The terms transportation and transport derive from the Latin portare (“to carry”) and trans (“across”). Thus, transportation or transport means to carry something across space between one place and another. It concerns moving physical matter in the form of solids, liquids, gases, raw materials, and manufactured products as well as livestock and people. Items can be quantified by counting units, weights, or volumes carried. Here we use the term transportation to refer to the systematization of transport by humans for the purposes determined by humans. Systematizing transportation purposively is only possible if all the components and subsystems are interconnected.

Transportation systems comprise the infrastructure, traffic, communications, legal and quasi-legal regulations, rules, and controls, auxiliary support services, and skills which, taken together, determine how transportation takes place from highly local to global scales using any or all modes of known transportation through the media of land, water, or air, and into space beyond the Earth's atmosphere.

Classification of Transportation Systems

Transportation systems are often classified according to the media through which they move and by what is transported. The basic distinctions are between land, water, and air transport and between people and freight (cargo). Further geographical distinctions differentiate urban transportation from rural transportation and domestic transportation from international transportation. Multimodal transportation systems require integration and coordination. Many skills are needed to achieve this effectively.

Energy for Transportation Systems

As noted by John Tiffin and Chris Kissling, it takes energy to transport matter through a medium. When transport depended on people and animals, the energy they needed came from the food they ate. When they used sails, it came from the wind. The industrial revolution meant that the energy that drove transport came primarily from coal and, after the 1960s, from oil.

Burning coal and oil produces gases that contribute to atmospheric pollution. That pollution is recognized by reputable scientists as contributing to global warming. Alternative fuels for transport systems derived from abundant clean renewable sources are being sought as a response to fears of escalating humanly induced global climate change and the inevitability of global fossil oil depletion. Biofuels derived from nonfood sources along with solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, waves, and tidal flows look promising as renewable energy sources for powering transportation vehicles, but conversion from one energy form to another results in the loss of usable energy to do work.

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