Transport or transportation is the movement of people and goods from one place to another. The term is derived from the Latin trans ("across") and portare ("to carry"). Industries which have the business of providing equipment, actual transport, transport of people or goods and services used in transport of goods or people make up a large broad and important sector of most national economies, and are collectively referred to as transport industries.
Aspects of transport
The field of transport has several aspects: loosely they can be divided into a triad of infrastructure, vehicles, and operations. Infrastructure includes the transport networks (roads, railways, airways, waterways, canals, pipelines, etc.) that are used, as well as the nodes or terminals (such as airports, railway stations, bus stations and seaports). The vehicles generally ride on the networks, such as automobiles, bicycles, buses, trains, aircrafts. The operations deal with the way the vehicles are operated on the network and the procedures set for this purpose including the legal environment (Laws, Codes, Regulations, etc.) Policies, such as how to finance the system (for example, the use of tolls or gasoline taxes) may be considered part of the operations.
Broadly speaking, the design of networks are the domain of civil engineering and urban planning, the design of vehicles of mechanical engineering and specialized subfields such as nautical engineering and aerospace engineering, and the operations are usually specialized, though might appropriately belong to operations research or systems engineering.
Modes and categories
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- Air transport
- Cable transport
- Conveyor transport
- Human-powered transport
- Hybrid transport
- New Mobility Agenda
- Rail transport
- Road transport, including human-powered transport such as walking and cycling
- Ship transport
- Space transport
- Sustainable transportation
- Transport on other planets
- Proposed future transport
Air transport
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- Bus
- Road train
- Semi-trailer truck
- Truck
- Limousine
- Taxicab
- Share taxi
- Carpooling
Water transport
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- A rule of thumb says "a boat can fit on a ship, but a ship can't fit on a boat", and a ship usually has sufficient size to carry its own boats, such as lifeboats, dinghies, or runabouts.
- Often local law and regulation will define the exact size (or the number of masts) that distinguishes a ship from boats.
- Traditionally submarines were called "boats", perhaps reflecting their cramped conditions: small size reduces the need for power, and thus the need to surface or snorkel for a supply of the air that running diesel engines requires; in contrast, nuclear-powered submarines' reactors supply abundant power without consuming air, and such craft are large, much roomier, and classed as ships.
Another definition says a ship is any floating craft that transports cargo for the purpose of earning revenue; in that context, passenger ships transport "supercargo", another name for passengers or persons not working on board. However, neither fishing boats nor ferries are considered ships, though both carry cargo (their catch of the day or passengers) (and for that matter lifeboats).
English seldom uses the term watercraft to describe any specific individual object (and probably then only as an affectation): rather the term serves to unify the category that ranges from small boats to the largest ships, and also includes the diverse watercraft for which some term even more specific than ship or boat (e.g., canoe, kayak, raft, barge, jet ski) comes to mind first. (Some of these would even be considered at best questionable as examples of boats.)
Ship transport
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- Water taxi
- Short sea shipping
Transport and communications
Transport and communication are both substitutes and complements. Though it might be possible that sufficiently advanced communication could substitute for transport, one could telegraph, telephone, fax, or email a customer rather than visiting them in person, it has been found that those modes of communication in fact generate more total interactions, including interpersonal interactions. The growth in transport would be impossible without communication, which is vital for advanced transportation systems, from railroads which want to run trains in two directions on a single track, to air traffic control which requires knowing the location of aircraft in the sky. Thus, it has been found that the increase of one generally leads to more of the other.
Transport and land use
The first Europeans who came to the New World brought with them a culture of transportation centred on the wheel. North America's Aboriginal peoples had developed differently, and moved through their country by means of canoes, kayaks, umiaks, coracles, and other water-borne vehicles, constructed from various types of bark, hide, bone, wood, and other materials; as well, the snowshoe, toboggan and sled were essential during the winter conditions that prevailed throughout the northern half of the continent for much of the year. Europeans quickly adopted all of these technologies themselves, and therefore were able to travel to the northern interior of Canada via the many waterways that branched out from the St. Lawrence River and from Hudson Bay.[2]
There is a well-known relationship between the density of development, and types of transportation. Intensity of development is often measured by area of floor area ratio (FAR), the ratio of usable floorspace to area of land. As a rule of thumb, FARs of 1.5 or less are well suited to automobiles, those of six and above are well suited to trains. The range of densities from about two up to about four is not well served by conventional public or private transport. Many cities have grown into these densities, and are suffering traffic problems.
Land uses support activities. Those activities are spatially separated. People need transport to go from one to the other (from home to work to shop back to home for instance). Transport is a "derived demand," in that transport is unnecessary but for the activities pursued at the ends of trips. Good land use keeps common activities close (e.g. housing and food shopping), and places higher-density development closer to transportation lines and hubs. Poor land use concentrates activities (such as jobs) far from other destinations (such as housing and shopping).
There are economies of agglomeration. Beyond transportation some land uses are more efficient when clustered. Transportation facilities consume land, and in cities, pavement (devoted to streets and parking) can easily exceed 20 percent of the total land use. An efficient transport system can reduce land waste.
Transport in cities
Because of the much higher densities of people and activities, environmental, economic, public health, social and quality of life considerations and constraints are important in cities.
Urban transport has been led by professional transport planners and traffic experts, who have made use of the same forecasting and response tools that they have used to good effect in other transport sectors. This has led in most cities to a substantial overbuilding of the road and supporting infrastructure, which has maximized throughput in terms of the numbers of vehicles and the speeds with which they pass through and move around in the built-up areas.
Too much infrastructure and too much smoothing for maximum vehicle throughput means that in many cities there is too much traffic and many - if not all - of the negative impacts that come with it. It is only in recent years that traditional practices have started to be questioned in many places, and as a result of new types of analysis which bring in a much broader range of skills than those traditionally relied on – spanning such areas as environmental impact analysis, public health, sociologists as well as economists who increasingly are questioning the viability of the old mobility solutions. European cities are leading this transition.
See also
Transport, energy, and the environment
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- CEDEX ES
- CERTU FR
- CRF IT
- Centre for Transport Studies Imperial College UK
- Delft University of Technology NL
- DLR DE
- Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule CH
- LCPC FR
- INRETS FR
- TNO NL
- Transport & Mobility Leuven BE
- Transport Research Laboratory TRL UK
- VTT FI
- Joint OECD-ECMT Transport Research Centre
- European Conference of Ministers of Transport
The European Commission supports the co-operation and collaboration amongst the transport laboratories by funding projects like EXTR@Web and Intransnet. Especially the transition from planned economy to achieving a stable position on the market will be a challenge for laboratories in the new member states. Another EU-project etra.ccis coping with those problems.
USA:
See also
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