The Dictionary of Human Geography

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Suggested reading

Glick Schiller and Fouron (2001); Mitchell

(1997); Smith and Guarnizo (1998).

transport costs The total costs involved in

moving between two places, which in the case

of goods movements involves not only the

freight ratebut also the costs of documenta-

tion, packaging, insurance and inventory.

Transport costs are a central element in most

classicallocation theories, being presented

as a primary determinant of both agricultural

land use (seevon thu

..

nen model)andindus-

trial location theories,aswellasmosttheoriesof

spatial interaction(cf.distance decay): they

were at the heart of arguments for geography as

spatial science, or as a ‘discipline in distance’

(Watson, 1955: cf.locational analysis). rj

transport geography This field of study

focuses on the movement of people and goods,

the transportation systems designed to facili-

tate such movement, and the relationship

of transportation to other facets of human

geography such as economicdevelopment,

energy, land use, sprawl, environmental

degradation, values and culture. Long-

standing, strong ties with the fields of civil

engineering and economics have imbued

transport geography with a tradition ofquan-

titative methods, particularly the use of

mathematical models. These ties have at

once enabled transport analysts to respond to

pressing planning problems and tended to

limit the questions that transport geographers

ask, often directing attention towards tech-

nique and away from theory (Hanson, 2000).

Studies of the movement of people and

goods have sought to build predictive models

of the volume offlowsbetween places; these

models predict flows as a function of the

demandfor movement between nodes (usually

associated with various measures of node size)

and thecost of movement between nodes,

which in turn is related to distance, the mode

of travel (e.g. airplane, ship, automobile), and

the ease of movement,inter alia.Suchmodelsof

spatial interactionare important to a range of

actors including urban transportation planners,

who are responsible for providing transport fa-

cilities that will handle predicted flow volumes,

and commercial airlines, which must also pro-

vide sufficient capacity to meet predicted de-

mand. In transportation geography, the

linkages among modelling, prediction and plan-

ning have been exceedingly strong.

Studies of transportation systems have fo-

cused on patterns ofnetworksand nodes

and have often considered how these patterns

affect ease of movement and therefore shape

land-use and settlement patterns. In the USA,

the advent of the inter-state highway system,

beginning in the 1950s, led to the demise of

some places by-passed by the system and to

the growth of other places, whoseaccessibil-

itywas enhanced by connection to the inter-

state system (Garrison, Berry, Marble,

Nystuen and Morrill, 1959). More recently,

the deregulation of the airlines led to the

development of the hub-and-spoke system

that describes the current network of air travel

in the USA (O’Kelly, 1998); again, the network

configuration favours certain nodes (the hubs,

many of which have grown into thriving com-

mercial centres) to the detriment of others

(nodes at the extremities of the spokes, which

have seen their accessibility via air decline).

Transport systems studies have also examined

competition between and among modes (e.g.

trucking versus the railroads and waterways)

and between and among routes on the same

mode (e.g. among the multiple routes between

Chicago and the US east coast in the early

twentieth century). Of current interest is the

impact ofinternetcommerce on transport:

whereas such commerce might reduce the

number of person–trips, it has led to an enor-

mous increase in the demand for goods move-

ment (Aoyama, Ratick and Schwarz, 2006).

Transport is intimately related to a host of

issues that lie at the heart ofhuman geog-

raphy. energy consumption and environ-

mental degradation are just two that link

closely to the nature–society tradition in geog-

raphy. Because transportation systems are

designed to increase accessibility and accessi-

bility is central to land-use patterns and to

economic development, transport studies

have much to offer the field ofdevelopment.

valuesandculture, which are hugely import-

ant to understandings of transport patterns

and systems, have been mostly neglected by

transport geographers. sha

Suggested reading

Black (2003); Rodigue, Comtois and Slack

(2006).

transportation problem A special case of

linear programming, where the objective is

to find the minimum-cost solution that trans-

ports goods fromNorigins toMdestinations.

The supplies available at each origin and the

demands required at each destination define

the constraints, and the transportation prob-

lem assumes that each origin is directly

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_T Final Proof page 773 31.3.2009 9:40pm Compositor Name: ARaju

TRANSPORTATION PROBLEMTRANSPORTATION PROBLEM