06021 There and Back Again: Geography and Transportation

Who decides what is margin and what is text? Who decides where the borders of the homeland run? Absences and silences are potent. It is the eloquent margins which frame the official history of the land. As for geography, there are divisions and boundary lines that fissure any state more deeply than the moat it digs around the nationhood. In every country there are gaping holes. People fall through them and disappear. Yet on every side there are doors to a wider place, a covert geography under sleep where all the waters meet. — Janet Turner Hospital

Where you live is the beginning.

It is the origin of your movements.

Each trip that you make has its origin and an ultimate destination. It may have some intermediate destinations and stops.

Your trips have an essence, or nature, or to use a more prosaic word — a reason.

For example, you go to work. You may do some shopping on the way to and from work, but the trip is primarily a job commute. You may go to church, or to school, or out for dinner and drinks with friends. Each of those trips has a meaning within your life.

All this activity costs energy and resources and produces climate-forcing emissions.

Transportation networks prescribe your ability to travel.

These are complex and expensive in every way possible — money, resources, and energy. They are so interwoven with our lives that they are practically invisible. We get in our cars and drive and we don’t notice the wires and systems that connect the stop lights. We are oblivious to the repair and maintenance infrastructure that fixes the roads and paints lines to direct traffic and indicate parking. We don’t see the pipelines that bring liquid fuels to our region nor the tanker trucks that fill the underground (and thus invisible) tanks at gasoline stations and convenience stores. There are the financial systems that pay the bills and make the system possible. Governments and corporations involve themselves at every transaction in the transportation process.

This is only the beginning of the deep trouble we are in thanks to the inefficiencies of our transportation systems, the primitive nature of our accounting systems, and the quick-fix/pro-gluttony mentality of our politicians and the electorates who give them power.

Transportation systems consist of methods and infrastructure that link trip origins and trip destinations. The purpose is to move people, freight, and information from one place to another.

Transportation overcomes space.

I am here at my home in one space, I desire to go to another space — my job. There is geography between here and there. Distance, time, the lay of the land, government, the condition and extent of the infrastructure, and your personal economic circumstances influence your journey to a destination. Each of these issues, to a greater or lesser extent, regulates the amount, type, rapidity, and cost of transportation.

Factors that influence the flow of transportation include —

Geography. Places are either close to each other, or they are not close, or an intermediate situation is the case.

Physical. There is an excellent infrastructure linking particular origins and destinations, or there isn’t, or a medium or intermediate case at play.

Transaction Costs. Transportation does not flow automatically. There are transaction costs at every step of the journey. There are ports of entry, administrative costs, taxes and fees to pay, maintenance and capital costs.

Distribution. There may be many routes to choose from or not so many. There may be only one way to get there. It may not be possible to get there from here, depending on your access to transportation. If you don’t own a car, and can’t afford a cab, a substantial amount of territory is off limits to you.

Transportation is of vital importance to all human settlements and cultures. Without the transportation of goods, services, people, and information, billions of people would die of starvation.

Transport facilitates access to education, health care, and all other goods and services. It links inextricably with economic development. This connection can be seen in virtually every human settlement.

Transportation has enormous environmental impacts and consequences. It may be invisible, but it embeds in almost all social, economic, and personal transactions. For these reasons and more, it is a primary target of government regulation and activity.

The physical environment is a primary definer of transportation systems. This includes the climate, the hydrology (water systems) of the area, and the topography (the shape and lay of the land)

Transportation involves the expenditure of energy, in copious quantities, to overcome these physical constraints.

We move along through a blizzard in automobiles whose industrial designers perfectly condition their interiors for our environment. In the winter, snow plows and sanding trucks make travel possible by continually working against the precipitation of snow and ice. We build roads with an understanding of the climate conditions that can be expected during their lifetimes. Political interpretations of transportation needs dictate the routes of our roads.

All locations connected by transportation have a site and a situation. The site refers to the actual physical location, such as the address of my house. The situation refers to the relationships between that particular location and other locations. The situation is a composite of the variables of —

Cost. What is the economic cost of moving to or from the location?

Access. Depending on your transportation situation, all locations can be accessed, but all access is not equal. Some sites are much more accessible than others. Access is desirable and the economic costs of sites reflects the desirability of their access compared to other places with less desirable access.

Co-location. The more desirable a location, the more activities will be located there. Consider how fast food restaurants and convenience stores selling gasoline accumulate at the exits of interstate highways.

Time. One of the primary issues with transportation is how much time it takes to move from one location to the other. In the modern world, we trade money for time — we spend money to reduce the time of our transit. The available methods of transit and the extent of the connecting infrastructures are primary influencers of transit times.

One curious bit of data is that in both the United States and the United Kingdom, people travel about 1 hour a day — 30 minutes to work and 30 minutes to return home. As people's affluence grows, they continue to travel 30 minutes a day, but they travel further and faster. There’s some indication that this holds true for previous eras too. Walking about 5 kilometers an hour (3 MPH), for a half hour outbound, gives you a territory radius of 2.5 km (1.5 miles), which defines a territory of about 20 square kilometers (8 square miles). This is the area associated with Greek villages to this day. People refer to this tendency towards 30 minute commute times as Marchetti’s Constant.

Transportation networks consist of individual routes that connect locations. Networks are both spontaneous and designed. They often reflect heritage methods of transportation. People tell a story of the game trail that became a cattle trail, that became a route for wagons. Ultimately it became a gravel road, then a paved highway, and finally an interstate highway.

There are three kinds of geographic distribution of transportation networks —

Centralized — all routes lead to a central point.

Decentralized — while the center point still has high accessibility, there are lateral routes that connect other nodes in the system with each other without going through the center.

Distributed — there is no center of focus for the network.

The bottom line is that ACCESS — determined by geography, energy, invisible structures, and economics — is a major issue in your life and in the life of the planet. How we care for people, care for the planet, and care for the future can be seen in our access decisions.

“Driving less” is one of the essentials of a beneficial future.

“Driving more” is a prescription for collapse and calamity.

To drive less requires careful attention to Access issues — geography, energy, invisible structures, economics.

Besides driving less, we need to travel less. People living in the developed world have a generous sense of entitlement to travel. Many of us seem to consider the ability to travel anywhere, at any time, without any regard whatsoever for the ecological consequences of our travel, to be an inalienable right.

It’s a complex issue, but there is a clear and unambiguous bottom line --

Driving more and traveling more are lifestyle practices that drive us toward the ash heap of history.

There is no way to sugar-coat that message. It is a stark reality that we must adapt to or the future is catastrophic collapse and die-off.