How

Is the Movement of People, Goods,

and Ideas Transforming the World?
Without the movement of goods, people, and ideas, cities falter,
economies wane, and societies wither. As local economies and
their associated land uses have become more specialized,
mobility has grown ever more central to the sustainability of
human activity. Economic specialization, which has fueled
productivity growth and propelled the dispersion of interlinked
activities worldwide, is premised upon various forms of mobility,
including the migration of labor from low-wage to high-wage
places, the daily travel of workers from their homes to
workplaces, the movement of materials to worksites, and the
distribution of >inished products to markets. When mobility
ceases, as in the case of a natural disaster, not only do
workplaces fall idle, but also people cannot get emergency
medical attention, families cannot obtain food, and social
gatherings of all sorts are canceled or postponed.
The increasing importance of mobility to local, regional, and
global economies and to everyday life is re>lected in data
showing the relentless increase in many measures of the
movement of people and goods (Figures 7.1 and 7.2). In the
United States, the movement of people and freight has been
steadily increasing.1 At the international scale, human migration
more than doubled between 1970 and 2000, with the largest
proportion of migrants moving to countries in the developed
world (Figure 7.2; Clark 2006a), and climate change is likely to
accelerate these trends (see special issue of Forced Migration
Review, 2008).
The evidence of steadily increasing mobility runs counter to
the claim that distance—and the movement required to
overcome it—no longer matters because of high-speed
information and communication technologies (ICTs; e.g.,
Cairncross, 1997). If ICT has rendered distance irrelevant, as
suggested by the death-of-distance hypothesis, then people and
businesses should have little reason to incur the time and money
costs involved in moving themselves or goods over increasingly
greater distances. People would rely primarily on the keyboard
and mobile phone to reach destinations of interest, and
measures of mobility would fall. Although ICT has had impacts
on physical movements at the scale of daily travel and may have
affected migration streams (e.g., via the outsourcing of software
development and call centers to India), the nature of the impacts
is complex and generally has not conformed to predictions
associated with the death-of-distance hypothesis (Mokhtarian,
2003; Janelle, 2004).
Persistent upward trends in mobility re>lect rising af>luence in
some cases (as in the United States) but can also exacerbate
differences among places (as when people move from rural areas
to cities); in addition, rising mobility is associated with
escalating con>lict in some instances (as in refugee >lows) and
can produce high levels of urban congestion. Because of the
strong links between motorized movement and petroleum
consumption, ever-increasing mobility also raises concerns
about greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation
 1
One exception is residential mobility, which has declined in recent decades. The proportion
of the U.S. population that changed residence in any given year has fallen from about 20
percent in the 1950s and 1960s to 12-13 percent in recent years (2006-2008).
See www.census.gov/population/socdemo/migration/tab-a-1.xls (accessed January 20,
2010).
Page 76

Suggested Citation:"7 How Is the Movement of People, Goods, and Ideas Transforming the World?." National
Research Council. 2010. Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical
Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12860.

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 FIGURE
7.1 The rise in passenger vehicle miles traveled (VMT) since
1970 in the United States closely tracks increasing incomes but
well exceeds population gains. In the United States, passenger
VMT in 2005 was more than 2.5 times VMT in 1970 whereas
population grew by a factor of only 1.5. Worldwide, passenger
travel (kilometers traveled) more than quadrupled between
1960 and 1990 and is expected to more than quadruple again by
 2050 (Schafer and Victor, 2000). NOTE: “Trucks, combination”
combines all vehicles with two or more units, one of which is a
tractor or straight truck power unit. Miles-traveled statistics are
for highway travel. SOURCES: Passenger VMT data from National
Transportation Statistics, Table 1-32; population statistics from
U.S. Census Bureau (2007), Table 2; combination truck statistics
from Federal Highway Administration (annual series), Table
VM-1.

FIGURE
7.2 The total number of international migrants in the world
increased steadily between 1970 and 2000, with an increasing
proportion of such migrants moving to developed countries as
 migration destinations. SOURCE: Adapted from International
Organization for Migration (2005).
Page 77

Suggested Citation:"7 How Is the Movement of People, Goods, and Ideas Transforming the World?." National
Research Council. 2010. Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical
Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/12860.

Save

Cancel

accounts for about one-third of the U.S. carbon emissions

stemming from energy use. The reliance of the transportation
sector on petroleum and its signi>icant contribution to carbon
emissions places mobility on geopolitical and climate change
agendas.