Transport Systems, Policy and Planning

A Geographical Approach

Rodney Tolley, Brian John Turton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781032221120
• eBook ISBN: 9781317902027
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Provides a unique review of the major spatial aspects of transport systems, a detailed analysis of transport problems in urban and rural areas, an evaluation of social and environmental impacts, and a planning and policy overview. Divided into four parts, each considering a different aspect of transport geography. The first part outlines the basic geography of transport and examines transport and spatial structures, focusing upon the varying contributions made by transport to industrial, agricultural and urban development. Part two moves to consider specific transport systems at both national and international scales, drawing on studies from industrialised and developing nations and discussing the effects upon transport of the political changes in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. The third part examines some of the many problems of transport and urban and rural areas using specific examples to illustrate the contrasting difficulties and evaluate current urban transportation planning methods.

1 Introduction

1.1 Transport systems and transport geography

Transport systems are the response to the ever-growing needs for contacts between individuals and societies and for the movement of commodities as part of national and global economies. A mother taking her children on the daily journey to school or the office worker on the regular journey on the metro to the city centre will see these trips simply as an inevitable start to the day, but each is in fact part of an aggregate and highly complex pattern of personal movements.

Similarly the scheduled deliveries of stock in 5-tonne loads to the hypermarket or of crude oil in quantities of 300 000 tonnes to the refinery both form an integral part of a commercial haulage industry that is an essential element of modern economies.

All these movements of individuals and of goods create demands that are met by the transportation industry, within which various distinctive modes of personal travel and freight haulage can be identified. Some movements will demand far less of the transport system than others: the school trip will often be made by car, driven by the mother and requiring very little from the system other than the use of about 2 or 3 km of road space, but the office-bound commuter relies upon an urban railway network with a heavy investment in track, rolling stock and operating staff. The daily deliveries of milk and dairy produce to individual urban households are made by fleets of small-capacity electric trucks but bulk oil transport involves supertanker operations at the global scale and specialist export and import terminals.

Because these requirements for the movement of people and of goods vary so greatly in terms of distance, frequency of journey and numbers (or tonnage), the transportation industry displays a similar variety in its levels of sophistication, organisation, scale of operations and the specific modes available. The character of this industry’s internal structure, the technical, financial and economic aspects of its management and operation, the complex links between transport modes and their markets and the external relationships between transport systems and national governments have all been extensively documented by historians, engineers, economists, geographers and other social scientists. The problems which arise in attempting to meet a given demand with a suitable transport facility have similarly been closely researched, and transport policy and planning are today two of the principal issues in society.

Any introduction to a new transport geography text must provide some explanation of how the geographer has approached studies of the transport industry and of how transport geography as a distinctive discipline may be defined. Ullman’s view that ‘transportation is a measure of the relations between areas and is therefore an essential part of geography’ (1956) still provides a valid standpoint and can be usefully complemented with White’s statement made in 1977: ‘For the geographer, the importance of transport lies in its being one of the principal factors affecting the distribution of social and economic activity. Thus there is a wide interest among geographers either in transport per se as a significant human activity, or indirectly through its influence upon the spatial distribution of other activities.’

Since these two statements were first published there has been a dramatic expansion in the variety and scope of transport-orientated issues which have been addressed by geographers but the essence of Ullman’s and White’s interpretations survives.

1.2 Transport geography in the 1980s and 1990s

Since the 1970s the interests and activities of transport geographers in several countries have been more strongly focused through the formation of specific research groups, resulting in an increased output of texts, papers and, more recently, journals devoted specifically to this discipline. In the UK the Transport Geography Study Group, as a part of the Institute of British Geographers, was founded in 1972 and its members have made a substantial contribution to the growth of the discipline. The aims and achievements of transport geography, as reflected in the group’s activities in its first decade, were reviewed by Williams in 1981, and in 1993 the launch of the Journal of Transport Geography, with which the group has been closely involved, provided a further opportunity for an updated appraisal of current themes and developments within the subject. From a purely practical point of view, therefore, the student of transport geography in the 1990s has access to a wider and more comprehensive collection of material published by geographers on transportation than has ever been previously available.

1.3 Approaches to transport geography

The development of transport geography has in many respects followed the path taken by geography in general in terms of its content, its methods and the progress which has been made to place current research within much broader societal perspectives. Where, for example, the inequalities in the distribution and delivery of health and welfare services have concerned the social geographer in recent years, transport geographers have looked in particular at levels of access to surgeries and clinics. Gender-based issues also provide a broad contemporary focus within geography, but the differing degrees of mobility of male and female groups within communities have been the especial concern of the transport geographer.

With the shift of emphasis over time on research directions in transport geography some issues have become of less significance or relevance, but there has been a steady accumulation of material which acts as a valuable source of information and stimulation to the student. The presentation of this material has naturally also varied according to the objectives and intentions of particular writers, and before the authors of this text explain the basis for its form and structure it is appropriate to include a brief review of the principal methods of approach to the subject adopted by earlier contributors.

Many of the earliest studies took what White (1977) described as a ‘transport and terrain’ approach, with an emphasis upon describing and explaining the relationships between transport routes and systems and the physical form of the areas they traversed. The process of route selection, for example, was seen by geographers as a useful illustration of how adapting the alignment of a road, canal or railway to the landscape provided a compromise between initial costs of construction and subsequent costs of operation.

The historical approach explores the initiation, growth and expansion of specific systems, with each stage of development being considered in the context of the technological, economic and social environments of the time. Many of the attempts to unravel the background to the intricate railway networks built in the nineteenth century in the UK and other European industrial countries have been set in this historical framework. In particular what Williams (1981) describes as the ‘coal dust and pounding steam’ approach is a feature of many books in which a natural enthusiasm for railways has been combined with the skills of the historian and the geographer.

The ‘quantitative revolution’ of the 1960s provided transport geographers with valuable new methods and techniques to investigate networks and to describe their form and levels of complexity with much greater precision. Descriptions of the South Wales railway network as ‘complicated and interlocking’ or of that in West Africa as ‘minimal’ could now be replaced with much more precise assessments based upon a structured analysis of each system. These statistical approaches were complemented by theoretical modelling techniques, allowing geographers to generate or simulate transport systems within a set of parameters and to compare these simulated patterns with actual systems at various stages of their development.

The more recent application of behavioural principles to transport geography has yielded most benefits in the areas of demand–supply relationships, and particularly in the complex process of the decisionmaking which precedes personal trip generation. This in turn is very closely associated with mobility, seen by Hoyle and Knowles (1992) as ‘a fundamental human activity and need’ which they identify as their ‘first cardinal principle’ in the study of transport.

Many of these approaches rest upon concepts and techniques taken from other subject areas, and it is almost impossible for the transport geographer to work successfully without borrowing from related facts and expertise. This multidisciplinary nature of transport studies is recognized by Hoyle and Knowles as their second cardinal principle.

1.4 The structure of this text

In this text the authors have attempted to provide an overview of what they see as the principal aspects of transport systems which have a geographical dimension and relevance. Not all of the many transport and transport-related issues of current interest to geographers can be dealt with in detail, but it is hoped that this book will help readers to appreciate the more significant developments in infrastructure, planning and policy of recent years.

Transport geography rests upon a continually evolving basis of established concepts and techniques which often emphasises the vital interactions between transport and other essentially spatial processes such as industrial location and urbanisation. These linkages are explored in Part One (Chs 2–4), which focuses upon demand and supply relationships, the form and structure of the principal modes, and the ways in which transport has contributed to the establishment of agricultural, industrial and urban patterns. Chapter 2 deals with how the demand for transport is created and the extent to which it is met, placing a particular stress upon the often intractable problems of mobility and accessibility in both advanced and developing countries. The daily sequence of journeys made by members of an African subsistence farmer’s household to tend crops and livestock and to collect water and firewood displays a very simple pattern of movements when compared with the tightly programmed network of freight trips within the retail distribution system of an industrialised nation, but both illustrate how access is such a dominant factor in transport.

Chapter 3 examines the character of the principal transport modes, including a review of the basic elements of network analysis and modelling. The effects of new technologies are briefly discussed, ranging from the electric tramways that proved such a successful innovation in urban areas in the early twentieth century to the air cushion vehicle (or hovercraft) of the 1960s that promised so much with its versatility but failed as a commercial venture. Chapter 4 examines the linkages between transport systems and the world’s principal agricultural, industrial and settlement patterns, emphasising how the relative importance of transport costs has changed in many economic activities.

In Part Two the character of transport systems is considered at the international (Ch. 5) and national scales (Ch. 6). The ‘shrinking world’, reflecting the ever-increasing ease with which distance can be covered, is a well-established and effective device used by geographers to illustrate how air transport or modern electronic communications have strengthened contacts at the global level. This search for the continual improvement of long-distance links has been the impetus behind some of the most impressive transport projects and innovations of the later twentieth century, including the jet airliner and its supporting chain of international airports, the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France and the ‘container revolution’ for freight haulage.

In Chapter 6 the parts played by the major modes within national transport systems are examined with reference to advanced industrial countries, states which until the late 1980s were subject to centralised economic planning and countries in the developing world. The spread of the limited access expressway, or motorway, throughout Anglo-America and western Europe is indeed dramatic evidence for the dominance of road transport in these continents, but in much of Africa a large proportion of all traffic is still composed of pedestrians and animal-drawn carts moving over seasonal tracks. Such disparities illustrate the diversity of the subject-matter of the transport geographer.

Within Europe the period since the end of the Second World War has been marked by the uneven rates of growth of the economies of states in the West and those which were until 1990 an integral part of the Soviet economic bloc. The collapse of Soviet-based governments in Russia and eastern Europe, and the adoption of more democratic policies, have been followed by attempts to forge closer links with western Europe, a process which will require massive investment in the transport infrastructures of states such as Poland, Hungary, Romania and the former eastern Germany. Many geographers are currently investigating the transport difficulties of these countries of eastern Europe, a region where substantial improvements in road and rail communications will be required to support planned economic developments.

For the greater part of the world’s population, travel is a necessary but seldom trouble-free activity. Whether we consider the motorist competing with many other fellow drivers for space within city-centre car-parks or the small-scale commercial farmer in a developing country carting his crops to market over dusty tracks, there is a serious mismatch between demand and supply in the transportation system. Part Three looks at these problems in urban and rural areas and reviews the very wide range of solutions that have been devised. Much of the world’s population is concentrated in towns and cities, and in the developing countries the rate of urbanisation is steadily increasing, so many of the difficulties in providing for the demand for travel are in these urban areas.

Chapter 7 considers these problems in cities of advanced and developing nations, showing how the most efficient means of urban travel, namely public transport and cycling, are rarely those which are most heavily used. Solving these problems (Ch. 8) requires the skills of many specialists, and the geographer has a specific role to play in the transport planning process since so many of the difficulties faced by the urban traveller have their roots in the discordance between the locations of the principal types of urban land use and the demands for transport which they generate. For example, the neighbourhood or ‘corner’ shop still survives to meet locally based small-scale needs of the pedestrian, but for the modern car-based shopper a visit to the out-of-town hypermarket is seen as the more convenient alternative. This chapter describes the standard planning process, accounts for its lack of success in relieving congestion and considers more recent approaches based upon limiting demand rather than catering for supply.

Placing firm limits upon private car traffic, coupled with the revitalisation of urban public transport, is now seen as a priority in the effort to solve traffic congestion. In many European cities the search for better public transport has led to the construction of what are known as light rapid transit systems. These are in effect updated versions of the conventional electric tramway, so that the call to ‘bring back the trams’ is really advocating the reapplication of a technology first devised a century ago.

Chapter 9 examines transport problems in rural societies and the various approaches to solving them. The difficulties experienced in industrialised countries are often confined to specific groups within the rural population, usually those without the use of a car. In developing nations, where much higher proportions of the populations are rural, transport problems can often affect entire communities. Regardless of degree of development, however, the basic problems are usually th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part One The basic framework
• Part Two Spatial systems
• Part Three Transport in urban and rural areas
• Part Four Implications, impacts and policies
• Bibliography
• Index