Transport Geography

Extracted and adapted from:

2011. M.E. O’Kelly. Transport Geography, in A Dictionary Of Transport Analysis Edited by

Kenneth Button, Henry Vega, and Peter Nijkamp, Edward Elgar Pub., pp 452-455.

The geography of transportation may be approached from a number of perspectives. First,

overcoming natural barriers in the physical environment (e.g. by tunnels, canals, bridges) may be
emphasized in the construction and arrangement of networks. Second, the geographer may
choose to develop extensive expertise on a region and all its interconnected transportation
aspects including the role of transportation investment in economic growth and development.
Gateways (such as ports) and other transportation infrastructure are always seen as a critical
element of a region’s ability to compete for trade and commerce. Finally, the geographer may
take an analytical, map-based view, extracting the nodes, linkages, hinterlands, and hierarchies
that shape a generic description of many evolving networks. In keeping with this later view, the
geographer would attempt to integrate many features of the spatial organization of a system, in
order to describe, explain and ultimately prescribe preferred transportation solutions. In all of
these endeavors, one should pay attention both to the analysis of economic underpinnings, as
well as be cognizant of the institutional and historical context in which the transportation puzzle
is being tackled.

Transport geography pays special attention to the stages of development associated with
emerging interconnections in a growing economy. Thus, geographers pay special attention to the
critical date of 1825 when the Erie Canal provided a route connecting the agricultural bounty of
the mid-west to the vast markets on the East Coast through a combination of a canal route and
the fortunate alignment of the Hudson River Valley (connecting New York to the interior at
Albany, south of the otherwise impassable Adirondacks). Significant events such as the
perfection of a steam powered boat (Fulton in 1808) followed much later by the completion of

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the subway system in New York (see Hood 1993), are examples of the kinds of studies that a
transport geographer would integrate within the particular place-specific details in getting to
know a region’s transport. It is fair to say that the steamboat opened the scene for the industrial
revolution in the 19th century, and the subway and mass transit opened the way for the massive
urban residential growth in the 20th century. Transportation geography examines the integration
of various social, economic, political and physical engineering processes.

Cronon (1991) provides an outstanding account of the integration of such processes and the
emergence of a place-specific geography, influenced by transport. He weaves the many natural
resource endowments, accidents of fate, the entrepreneurial spirit, and the alignment of
transshipment routes that came together to make Chicago one of the most remarkable success
stories in transport geography.

One exceptionally clear way that geographers and economists interested in network theory have
aided understanding is through recognition of the fundamental equation governing feasible
arbitrage for the movement of goods. Assuming, for simplicity, regional production functions
and a set of regional prices, the linkage of a potential supplier [source] to a demand location
[sink] cannot work out unless the transport costs required to overcome the spatial separation are
smaller than the spread in prices. In various guises, this rule both explains many aspects of
international trade, the regional specialization of production, and the absolute interdependence
between economies and the ability to provide suitable shipment arrangements. Price spread and
transport costs provide the pre-conditions for trade; of course trade and flow cannot as easily
take place in the presence of tariffs or other institutional barriers. Versions of the same rule
appear in the complementary slackness conditions, dual feasibility, and variational inequalities
that are at the bedrock of network equilibrium models.

It is in the later area that the transportation geographer moves beyond the basic description of
network flows, to the optimization of the least cost solution for commodity shipment and
allocation. The transportation problem of Linear Programming is exactly designed to make a
match between a set of spatially distributed sources (supply locations/factories or warehouses) to

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deliver desired quantities of goods to sinks (demand locations/cities or destinations) at lowest
overall cost. This is typical of the basic calculation that underlies multi-plant multi-market
distribution systems and, as outlined elsewhere in the logistics section, can be expanded to cover
quite realistic models for multiple commodities, economies of scale, and less than truck load
movements. In all cases the necessity to overcome the geographical or spatial separation between
areas rich in resources endowments (mines, forests, agricultural regions etc) to the places where
these commodities need to be provisioned is the fundamental problem in spatial economics and
optimization. Many extensions, such as allowing for endogenous determination of regional
prices, stem from the base case.

Geographers have traditionally dealt with the regional trade and interaction patterns that give
rise to, and provide the preconditions for interregional flow. Thus, hubs in networks, ports,
canals and intermodal transshipment nodes are set up to facilitate the movement of goods or
people, and increasingly information.

Air passenger movements hold special interest for geographers. The levels of spatial interaction
between places in a system of urban nodes are modeled as systematically related to the spatial
separation (distance or cost) the level of common interest between the two places (perhaps using
population or business size as surrogates) and the important role of various forms of spatial
competition including intervening opportunity, traffic shadow and competing destinations
effects. (All of these are explained in more depth in the current literature on spatial interaction.)

Geographers have directed large amounts of research to the network planning and interaction
that accompanies continental scale networks: the range of such endeavors is truly panoramic:
from early studies in the design for the U.S. Interstates; the analysis of the European TGV and
the provision of oil and gas pipeline networks in difficult geo-political circumstances (see
similar examples in the historical chapters in Taaffe, Gauthier and O’Kelly, 1996).

For trade to be considered, the price spread Vj – Ui must cover the transport cost, or in a sense
the transport costs have to be low enough to make it worthwhile to ship the goods. Eventually

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however, a situation known as space price equilibrium will drive the price spread down to the
level of the intervening transport costs (that leaves enough money for the transport agent to
make a living because the return to the initiative taken by the transportation agent is built into
the normal rate of profit in Cij) Transportation geographers are fascinated by this basic core
inequality which arises in many ways – as the dual feasibility condition in the LP (Vj – Ui
compared to Cij). In fact there are numerous examples of transportation services being called
forth in response to the perceived opportunity to link spatially spread out sources and sinks (oil
tankers; container ports). Opportunities for arbitrage occur when transportation services exist
and the entrepreneur links a cheap source to a ready market.

Increasingly, transportation geographers have turned to the study of urban transportation

networks as a topical arena for their studies. Thus, one expects transportation geography to
describe and explain, and ultimately attempt to optimize, urban accessibility in transit and auto
networks. Geographers have been at the forefront of the linkage of behavior and psychological
choice theory in the analysis of trip distribution, modal choice and route choice for urban
networks. These congested and contested transport networks are a natural place to explore issues
of efficiency and equity.

A recent revival in the area of economic geography has linked economic theory and the spatial
processes that are the basis for so much work by geographers. Such research sometimes treats
the transport sector as a necessary evil that does no productive work. The economist Von
Thunen, who noted that a wagon team would need to consume some of the transported hay as
the journey progressed, proposed such an idea long ago. Suffice it to say that this device (and its
modern incarnation in Krugman’s iceberg model of transport) is simply a way to avoid the
separate analysis of a transportation production sector. That view perhaps distracts attention
from an important insight, as one can readily see that the economic development impact of new
roads are in their labor-intensive construction, and in the emergence of a new transport freight
and service sector. (Entrepreneurs, potentially, could begin with a beaten up old truck, and
become behemoths of the trucking industry! Hoteliers at convenient junction points can see the
through-flow of passengers expand.)

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Transport geography studies the development and organization of linkages, nodes, and networks,
and does so either from a place-based specialization or more commonly through intensive
analysis of thematic aspects of the movement of goods and people. Thus, in this volume and
elsewhere we are accustomed to see geographical studies of particular modes and types of
commodity shipment.

References

Hood, Clifton, 1993. 722 Miles: The Building of the Subways and How They Transformed New
York, Simon and Schuster, New York.

Taaffe, Edward J., Howard L. Gauthier and Morton E. O’Kelly, 1996. Geography of
Transportation, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall,

Cronon, William, 1991. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, Norton, New York.

Morton E. O’Kelly (Ohio State University) okelly.1@osu.edu

(WORDS 1487 including references; excluding header and by-line)

Please cite to original published version.