Transportation geography is a sub-discipline of geography that deals with the mobility of people, goods and information and their spatial organization. It contains attributes and constraints regarding the origin, destination, extent, type, and purpose of mobility. The geography of transportation can be understood from a number of eight fundamental principles: Transportation is relevant to geography for two main reasons. First, transport infrastructure, terminals, modes of transport and networks occupy an important place in space and form the basis of a complex space system. Second, since geography attempts to explain spatial relationships, transportation networks are of particular interest because they represent the main physical medium for these interactions. Transportation is one of the most important human activities in the world, as it allows us to ease geographical restrictions. It is an indispensable part of the economy and plays an important role in supporting spatial relationships between sites. Transport creates links between regions and economic activities, between people and the rest of the world, thus creating added value. It consists of basic components which are modes, infrastructures, networks and flows.
These components are fundamental to transport, but they also underline that, despite significant technological, social and economic changes, geography remains an exceptional force shaping transport. Transportation geography has played a relatively minor role in transportation science, a field dominated by engineers and economists. This was partly due to the needs of industry, which focused on providing infrastructure and technology, at what cost and at what price. Today`s industry is much more complex and requires issues as diverse as safety, aesthetics, working conditions, environment and governance. Therefore, a much wider range of skills is needed and traffic studies have become a multidisciplinary field of application. Transportation geography has the potential to contribute to transportation studies, transportation planning and operations because of the breadth of approach and training. Nevertheless, the geography of transport, like the field of transport in general, does not receive a level of attention in academia commensurate with its economic and social importance. 3) The third major area of transport geography is demand. Demand is based on public demand for different modes of transport. For example, if commuters in a city are in constant traffic on a daily basis, public demand could support the development of a transit system such as light rail transit to move them within the city or two and out of the city and their homes. Overall, transportation is an important issue in geography because the global economy depends on transportation.
By studying the relationship between transportation and geography, researchers and geographers can better understand why cities, transportation networks and the global economy have evolved the way they have. The geography of transport is a very broad subject that covers many different subjects. For example, transportation geography could examine the relationship between the presence of a railway in a region and the percentage of commuters who use the train to get to work in a developed region. The social and environmental impacts of the creation of modes of transport are other topics within the discipline. Traffic geography also studies the limits of movement in space. An example of this could be how the shipment of goods varies at different times of the year due to weather conditions. The role of transportation geography is to understand the spatial relationships generated by transportation systems. This can lead to several misconceptions about transportation in terms of the respective relationships between access, accessibility, distance and time. A better understanding of spatial relationships is essential to help private and public transport actors mitigate key transport issues such as capacity constraints, transfer between different systems, reliability of mobility and integration of transport systems. Three fundamental geographical considerations apply to transportation systems: Transportation geography as a discipline became a branch of economic geography in the second half of the 20th century. In earlier considerations, particularly from the point of view of the geography of trade (late 19th and early 20th centuries), transport was an important factor for spatial economic representations of space, particularly in terms of the location of economic activities and the monetary costs of distance.
These cost considerations have become the basis for several geographic theories, such as central locations and site analysis (see Transportation and Space). The increasing mobility of people and goods has justified the emergence of transport geography as a specialized and independent field of study. 2) Transport networks are the second major area of transport geography and represent the structure and organisation of transport infrastructure such as roads or railway lines crossing an area. Transportation networks connect nodes and are important because they can directly affect the capacity and efficiency of the movement of people and goods. For example, a well-developed rail line would be an efficient transportation network for moving people and goods from two hubs, such as San Francisco to Los Angeles. It is up to traffic geographers to study the differences between two networks in order to move elements between nodes as efficiently as possible. The analysis of these concepts in transport geography is based on methods often developed by other disciplines such as economics, mathematics, planning and demography. For example, the spatial structure of transport networks can be analyzed using graph theory, which was originally developed for mathematics.
In addition, many models developed to analyze motion, such as the gravitational model, have been borrowed from the physical sciences. Multidisciplinarity is therefore an important feature of transport geography, as of geography in general, since each discipline gives a different dimension to transport geography. The geography of transport must be systematic, because one element of the transport system is linked to many others; Transportation systems are complex systems. The geographically informed person must understand the different forms of human settlements in terms of size, composition, location, arrangement, organization, function and history. People rarely live in isolation. Instead, they live in clusters ranging from small villages with hundreds of people to megacities with tens of millions of people. Organized groupings of human habitation are central to most aspects of human life: economic activities, transportation systems, means of communication, political and administrative systems, education, culture, and entertainment. Since the 1990s, transport geography has received new attention with new areas of research: transport has been important in geographical research for centuries. In the early days of geography, explorers used familiar shipping routes to explore new territory and establish trading outposts. As the global economy began to modernize and expand, rail and marine transportation became increasingly important, and knowledge of foreign markets was essential.
Today, the capacity and efficiency of transportation is important, so it is important to know the fastest way to move people and products, and in turn, it is important to understand the geography of the regions where these people and products move. These principles emphasize that there would be no transportation without geography and no geography without transportation. The objective of transport is therefore to transform the geographical attributes of cargo, passengers or information from a point of departure to a destination, thus adding value to them. There are significant operational differences between modes of transport, particularly between passengers and goods, which are often operated separately. The convenience with which this can be done varies greatly and is commonly referred to as mobility. All this is associated with a new and expanded mobility of people and goods and thus with new areas of investigation for transport geography. One of the reasons for the success of engineers and economists in transportation studies and applications is that their training in the application of mathematics and multivariate statistics was rigorous.