THE HISTORY OF TRANSPORTATION

The history of transportation is a vast and intricate tale of human ingenuity, evolving over millennia to meet the needs of growing civilization. From the earliest forms of transportation to modern advancements, the journey has been shaped by technological innovations, cultural shifts, and economic demands.

Transportation: As a system

A transport system is made up of nodes, networks, and demand. These relationships include locations expressing this demand, flows between them, and infrastructure to handle and link them. A transport system can move passengers, freight, and information separately or together.

• Demand. The movement of people, freight, and information for a variety of socioeconomic activities.

In economic systems, what happens in one sector impacts another; the demand for a good or service in one sector comes from another. When a consumer buys something in a store, it'll probably lead to the product being replaced, which will create demand for manufacturing, resource extraction, and transportation. The thing about transportation is that it can't exist alone, and a movement can't be stored. An unsold product in a store can sit on the shelf until bought (often with discounts), but an unsold seat or unused cargo capacity stays unsold. You can't bring it back as additional capacity. The transport offered here exceeded its demand, so an opportunity was missed.

Often, it's hard to reconcile the derived demand for transportation with an equivalent supply. Additional capacity is preferred by transport service providers to accommodate unforeseen demand (often at higher prices). Derived transport demand comes in two flavors:

• Direct derived demand. Economic activities wouldn't happen without movements that directly affect them. Commutes between home and work are common work-related activities. Work is available in one location (residence) and labor is needed in another (workplace), with transportation (commuting) being directly linked to this relationship. For online purchases, you'll have to travel to the store or get it delivered to your house. All components of a supply chain require movement of raw materials, parts, and finished products on modes like trucks, rail, or containerships. As a result, transportation is directly related to production and consumption.
• Indirect derived demand. Movements created by other movements. Fuel consumption from transportation activities is supplied by an energy production system that moves fuel from extraction zones to refineries and storage facilities. Warehouses can also be considered indirect derived demand since they don't move freight. The reason warehouses exist is because you can't move cargo directly from where it's made to where it's used. Services like roadside assistance (in case of an accident or mechanical problem) are also generated by passenger movements.

As a result of a price drop, transportation can also be seen as an induced (or latent) demand. Traffic increases when transport infrastructures are added because of higher accessibility. Congestion on roads is partly caused by induced transport demand because extra road capacity results in mode shifts, route shifts, redistribution of trips, new trips, and land use changes that create new and longer trips. However, induced demand doesn't always happen. A bigger terminal doesn't guarantee more traffic, since freight forwarders can pick which terminals they transit their traffic through, as with maritime shipping.

Several fields of inquiry can be used to approach transportation, of which some are at the core, like transport demand, nodes, and networks. Other topics are more peripheral, like natural resources, politics, and regional issues. All of them contribute to understanding transport activities and how they affect the economy, society, and the environment.

There's a lot of evidence that transportation is becoming more important, particularly given these trends:

Growth of the demand: As individuals (passengers) and freight mobility grew in the second half of the 20th century, transport demand grew too.The growth is due to more passengers and freight being moved, including longer distances. There's been a recent trend of mobility growth, which has resulted in a multiplication of journeys involving different modes of transport.

Reduction of costs: Even though ships and planes are expensive to own and operate, costs per unit transported have dropped significantly over the last few decades. It's especially true for transportation services under competitive pressure. The lower transportation costs made it possible to cover longer distances and take advantage of space's advantages. Therefore, despite the lower costs, the share of transport activities in the economy has stayed relatively constant. Transportation services are more popular, but their costs are going down.

Expansion of infrastructures. Both of these trends have increased demand for transport infrastructures. There have been a lot of expansions in roads, rails, ports, airports, telecommunications, and pipelines to serve new areas. Land use is therefore heavily influenced by transportation infrastructure.

A big part of the spatial differentiation of the economy is where resources (raw materials, capital, people, information, etc.) are located and how well they can be distributed. Routes are established to distribute resources between places where they're abundant and scarce, but only if the costs are lower than the benefits. Therefore, transportation affects global, national, and regional economies. A strategic infrastructure is so embedded in the socioeconomic life of individuals, institutions, and corporations that consumers often don't even realize it's there, but it's always there. Transportation's perceived invisibility comes from its efficiency, which is paradoxical. Transport disruptions can have dramatic consequences, like workers not being able to reach their workplaces, parts not being delivered to factories, and goods not being available in stores.

Transport geography is a multidisciplinary field that can be approached from several angles:

• Economics. This dimension is about mobility and its associated costs, like financing, building, and maintaining transport modes and infrastructures. Return on investment and profitability are often used to measure and justify the performance of transport systems. It also looks at the transport demand generated by different sectors like retail, manufacturing, and government.
• Engineering. Concerned with building and maintaining transportation modes and infrastructure, which rely on materials sciences like civil engineering and mechanical engineering. Transport supply is heavily influenced by engineering.
• Environment / Ecology. Concerned about how transportation impacts ecological systems like the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the ecosphere. As well as noise and pollution, it takes a wide range of externalities into account. Besides topography and climate, this field also deals with the effects of natural conditions on transportation.
• History. Examines the evolution of transport networks in time and space, trying to identify specific conditions that have influenced their establishment as well as the technological, economic, and social environments that have produced them.
• Mathematics and Computer Science. Tools and methods for managing and analyzing transport-related information.Math models are used a lot in transport geography, like spatial interaction models. By optimizing the distribution and scheduling of transportation resources, operations research has contributed greatly to the field of transportation.
• Planning and Policy. Several agents, their jurisdictions, and intervention strategies make up the political dimension of transportation. Basically, it's about how corporations and governments allocate transportation resources.
• Sociology and Demography. Topics include accidents, driver behavior, and modal and spatial choices that affect distance traveled. For instance, the social costs of car use impose burdens on health and safety systems (police, ambulance, trauma centers, road signs, etc.). The evolution of the transport system and the modes used and the level of services are also influenced by demographics and changes like aging.
• Technology. A study of how technology affects transportation systems, not necessarily a field of study. It's all about infrastructure, modes, and motive forces. As technology progresses, new distribution systems have emerged, while others have gone away.

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