Questão de Língua Inglesa · CESGRANRIO Transpetro PSP-RH-2016.1 (nº 12)

Transportation in Geography

The world is obviously not a place where features such as resources, people and economic activities are randomly distributed; there is a logic, or an order, to spatial distribution. Geography seeks to understand the spatial order of things as well as their interactions, particularly when the spatial order is less evident. Transportation is one element of this spatial order as it is at the same time influenced by geography as well as having an influence on it. For instance, the path followed by a road is influenced by regional economic and physical attributes, but once constructed the same road will shape future regional developments. Transportation is of relevance to geography for two main reasons. First, transport infrastructures, terminals, modes and networks occupy an important place in space and constitute the basis of a complex spatial system. Second, since geography seeks to explain spatial relationships, transport networks are of specific interest because they are the main physical support of these interactions.

Transport geography, as a discipline, emerged as a branch of economic geography in the second half of the twentieth century. In earlier considerations, particularly in commercial geography (late 19th and early 20th century), transportation was an important factor behind the economic representations of the geographic space, namely in terms of the location of economic activities and the monetary costs of distance. These cost considerations became the foundation of several geographical theories such as central places and location analysis. The growing mobility of passengers and freight justified the emergence of transport geography as a specialized field of investigation.

In the 1960s, transport had to be formalized as key factors in location theories and transport geography began to rely increasingly on quantitative methods, particularly over network and spatial interactions analysis. However, from the 1970s, technical, political and economic changes challenged the centrality of transportation in many geographical and regional development investigations. The strong spatial anchoring effect of high transportation costs receded and decentralization was a dominant paradigm that was observed within cities (suburbanization), but also within regions. The spatial theory foundations of transport geography, particularly the friction of distance, became less relevant, or less evident, in explaining socioeconomic processes. As a result, transportation became underrepresented in economic geography in the 1970s and 1980s, even if the

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mobility of people and freight and low transport costs were considered as important factors behind the globalization of trade and production.

Since the 1990s, transport geography has received renewed attention with new realms of investigation. The issues of mobility, production and distribution became interrelated in a complex geographical setting where the local, regional and global became increasingly blurred through the development of new passengers and freight transport systems (Hoyle and Knowles, 1998). For instance, suburbanization resulted in an array of challenges related to congestion and automobile dependency. Rapid urbanization in developing economies underlined the challenges of transport infrastructure investment for private as well as collective uses. Globalization supported the development of complex air and maritime transportation networks, many of which supporting global supply chains and trade relations across long distances. The role of information and communication technologies was also being felt, often as a support or as an alternative to mobility. All of the above were linked with new and expanded mobilities of passengers, freight and information.

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The text points out two main reasons why transportation is of relevance to geography.

These two reasons are: