Transportation Geography

Historical Events Shaping Contemporary Transport Geography

Research in transportation geography ranges from the theoretical to the applied, addressing issues at multiple scales in both developing and developed nations. Several streams of contemporary research in transportation geography can be traced to important developments that occurred decades ago. For example, much of the current urban-oriented transport geography can be traced to events of the 1950s and 1960s. One of the most critical of these events was the Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS) conducted during the 1950s. This project was the first large-scale transportation study, and among its goals was developing predictive models of traffic flows in the Chicago metropolitan region. The methods established in the CATS have been refined over the years and applied in many other places. In fact, predictive traffic modeling generally has persisted to the present as a major transportation research focus. As a second related example, research on urban housing and labor markets during the 1960s laid a theoretical foundation for a generation of urban transportation geographers to address basic issues of residential and employment location choice and their implications for people's travel behavior.

Long a popular topic, the analysis of transportation networks, approached by abstracting highway, airline, rail, and other forms of transportation infrastructure to their essential geometric objects (i.e., representing them as points and lines), grew out of earlier work during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many quantitative tools rooted in principles of analytic geometry and linear algebra were created to measure the spatial properties of networks such as their internal connectivity, their redundancy, and the accessibility they provided. Some of these tools have been incorporated into the analytic capabilities of modern-day GIS, thereby making these systems available to users of the software for implementation in various problem-solving situations.

Transportation geographers continue to experiment extensively with the spatial interaction model (or gravity model). A series of books and articles during the 1950s and 1960s described how the gravity model of planetary physics could be adapted and applied to problems of a geographic nature. The range of geographic questions that have been addressed with gravity models since those innovations is vast, although a commonality of these applications is the notion that interaction between locations can be estimated based on a proxy for the size and types of activities at locations and the geographic distances between them. This approach has had wide appeal for addressing spatial transportation problems. It has provided geographers with a means of estimating vehicle traffic flows between parts of a city, predicting trade volumes of goods between nations and air traveler exchanges between major cities, and determining interactions in many other types of scenarios.

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