Means of transport

The traffic dislocation in Thailand.

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 transport equipment, transport services are important in most national economies, and are referred to as transport industries.

Aspects of transport

The field of transport has several aspects: loosely they can be divided into 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). Vehicles travelling on the networks will include automobiles, bicycles, buses, trains and aircraft. 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.

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.

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 (ex 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 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.