Transport and Communication

Written and reviewed by Subhra Gupta, Humanities faculty at UniDrill (M.A. Sociology, University of Delhi · 7 years teaching Humanities). Based on NCERT Geography Class XII (Fundamentals of Human Geography), Chapter 7.

Why does coal go by rail, flowers by air and petrol through a pipe?

No region has everything. Coal sits in one place, factories in another and consumers in a third. Transport, communication and trade connect producing centres with consuming centres, and the choice of mode is a matter of what is being carried, how far, how fast and at what cost. This chapter shows why each mode wins its own job and where the great routes of the world run. In earlier days transport and communication were the same thing, because a message needed a carrier. Today both have specialised forms.

The big idea: modes, networks and fit

Transport is the carriage of persons and goods from one place to another using humans, animals and vehicles, over land, water and air. Pipelines carry petroleum, natural gas and ores in liquid form. It is an organised service industry that includes the arteries (routes), the vehicles, and the organisation that maintains the arteries and handles loading, unloading and delivery. Every nation has also built transport for defence, and assured, speedy transport with efficient communication promotes cooperation and unity among scattered peoples.

A transport network is a set of places (nodes) joined by routes (links) to form a pattern. The principal modes are land, water, air and pipelines, used for inter-regional and intra-regional movement. Every mode except pipelines carries both passengers and freight. The significance of a mode depends on the goods, the cost and what is available.

In a well-managed system the modes complement each other. This sentence appears in exam questions as an explanation topic, so keep an example ready: a ship brings oil to a port, a pipeline takes it to a refinery, a truck delivers the product to the door.

Land transport

Most movement of goods and services happens on land. People were the first carriers (think of a palanquin carried by four men), then animals, and with the wheel came carts and wagons. The revolution came only with the steam engine in the eighteenth century. The first public railway line opened in 1825 between Stockton and Darlington in northern England, and railways became the most popular and fastest form of transport in the nineteenth century. In the USA, they opened the continental interiors for commercial grain farming, mining and manufacturing. The internal combustion engine then transformed road transport. Newer land transport includes pipelines, ropeways and cableways, which suit steep mountain slopes and mines where roads cannot be built.

The old forms such as the human porter, pack animal and cart are the most expensive per unit moved, and large freighters are the cheapest. In densely populated parts of India and China, human porters and hand-drawn carts still move goods overland. Different animals suit different places.

Roads

Road transport is the most economical over short distances and gains importance because of door-to-door service. Unmetalled roads are simple to build but unusable in the rainy season, and even metalled roads suffer in heavy rain and floods. In such conditions the high embankment of a rail track and good railway maintenance help, but rail kilometrage is small and cannot serve vast, developing countries cheaply. So roads play a vital role in trade, commerce and tourism.

Road quality differs greatly between developed and developing countries because roads need heavy spending. Developed countries have good roads everywhere, with motorways, autobahns (Germany) and inter-state highways. The world's total motorable road length is only about 15 million km, of which North America has 33 per cent. It has the highest road density and the highest number of vehicles, more than Western Europe.

When the road network cannot cope with demand, congestion occurs. City roads suffer chronic congestion with peaks (rush hours before and after work) and troughs. The remedies the chapter lists for urban transport are higher parking fees, improved public bus service and mass rapid transit (MRT).

Highways are metalled roads connecting distant places, built for unobstructed movement with separate lanes, bridges, flyovers and dual carriageways, and described as about 80 m wide. Where the chapter names them, they are best learned as a place table.

Border roads are laid along international boundaries. They integrate people in remote areas with major cities, provide defence, and carry goods to border villages and military camps.

Railways

Railways carry bulky goods and passengers over long distances. Railway gauge (distance between the two rails) varies by country.

Commuter trains are popular in the U.K., USA, Japan and India and carry millions daily. About 13 lakh km of railways are open for traffic in the world. The network differs sharply from continent to continent.

Africa's important routes are the Benguela Railway (Angola to the Katanga-Zambia Copper Belt), the Tanzania Railway (Zambian Copper Belt to Dar-es-Salaam), the railway through Botswana and Zimbabwe linking landlocked states to the South African network and the Blue Train. In Algeria, Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya and Ethiopia, lines connect port cities to the interior but do not form a good network with other countries.

Trans-continental railways run across a continent and link its two ends. They were built for economic and political reasons, to allow long runs in different directions. Their importance has fallen because of quicker, more flexible airways and roadways.

A Trans-Asiatic Railway linking Istanbul with Bangkok via Iran, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Myanmar has been proposed.

Pause and predict: a country has huge wheat farms far from its ports and a few big cities. Which land mode will carry most of the grain, and why not trucks?

Check your answer: railways, because they are best for large volumes of bulky materials over long distances. Roads win over short distances and for door-to-door delivery, but they are costlier for bulk over very long runs.

Water transport

Water transport has a big advantage: it needs no route construction. Oceans are linked and open to ships of all sizes, and only ports at the two ends are needed. Friction of water is far less than on land, so the energy cost is lower. It divides into sea routes and inland waterways. Oceans give a smooth highway in all directions with no maintenance cost. Compared with land and air, ocean transport is the cheapest way to haul bulky material over long distances between continents. Refrigerated holds, tankers, specialised ships, radar, wireless and containers have improved cargo handling.

Coastal shipping is cheap and convenient for countries with long coastlines such as the USA, China and India, and if properly developed it can reduce congestion on land routes.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the North Atlantic sea route is the Big Trunk Route and carries one fourth of the world's foreign trade. In reality: in container shipping today the busiest trade lanes join East Asia with Europe and with North America, because manufacturing has shifted towards Asia since the period the chapter describes. Why it matters: learn the route as a textbook fact, but use the reason (two industrial regions on either side) to work out which routes are busy in any period.

Shipping canals. The Suez and Panama canals are two vital man-made waterways, the gateways of commerce for the eastern and western worlds.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: the Suez Canal is a sea-level canal without locks, and the Panama Canal has a six-lock system. In reality: both canals have been enlarged since the chapter's description. A new channel running parallel to part of the Suez Canal opened in 2015, and a third set of larger locks opened on the Panama Canal in 2016, so that bigger ships can pass. Why it matters: the exam asks for the textbook design, but the reason for building canals (cutting distance) is unchanged.

Inland waterways. Rivers, canals and lakes have carried cargo and passengers since ancient times. Development depends on the width and depth of the channel, continuity of flow and the transport technology used. Rivers are the only means of transport in dense forests, and very heavy cargo such as coal, cement, timber and ores can go by inland waterway. In India, riverways were once the main highways but lost importance because of competition from railways, lack of water because of diversion for irrigation, and poor maintenance. Many rivers have been made more navigable through dredging, stabilised banks, dams and barrages.

Air transport

Air transport is the fastest but very costly mode. Passengers prefer it for long distances, and it can move valuable cargo rapidly across the world. It is often the only way to reach inaccessible areas. It overcomes the friction of mountains, snow fields and deserts, brings goods to the Arctic regions of northern Canada, and is the only alternative in the Himalayan region when landslides, avalanches or heavy snowfall block routes. It also has strategic importance.

The textbook says no place in the world is now more than 35 hours away, that the U.K. pioneered commercial jet transport and that the USA developed post-war international civil aviation. More than 250 commercial airlines run regular services. Aircraft manufacture and operation need hangars, landing, fuelling and maintenance facilities, and airports are expensive, so they are more developed in highly industrialised countries with heavy traffic.

Inter-continental air routes. In the Northern Hemisphere there is a distinct east-west belt of routes. The network is dense in Eastern USA, Western Europe and South-east Asia, and the USA alone accounts for 60 per cent of the world's airways. Nodal points where routes converge or radiate include New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Rome, Moscow, Karachi, New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. Africa, Asiatic Russia and South America lack air services, and between 10 and 35 degrees latitude in the Southern Hemisphere services are limited because of sparse population, limited land and economic development.

Beyond the textbook. For the exam: supersonic aircraft cover London to New York in three and a half hours. In reality: the supersonic passenger service that did this, Concorde, stopped flying in 2003, and no supersonic passenger jet operates today. Ordinary jets now carry long distance travellers. Why it matters: the chapter's figure is a historical illustration of the speed of air transport, not a current service.

Pipelines

Pipelines carry liquids and gases for an uninterrupted flow: water, petroleum, natural gas, cooking gas (LPG) and even liquefied coal. In New Zealand milk goes from farms to factories by pipeline.

Communication

Early long-distance communication relied on the telegraph and the telephone. The telegraph helped the colonisation of the American West. During the early and mid twentieth century AT&T had a monopoly over the American telephone industry, and the telephone became a critical factor in the urbanisation of America, because firms centralised their functioning in city headquarters and located branch offices in smaller towns. Today the telephone is still the most commonly used mode, and in developing countries cell phones made possible by satellites are important for rural connectivity.

The first major breakthrough was the optic fibre cable (OFC). Telephone companies upgraded their copper cables to OFC, which transmits large quantities of data rapidly, securely and virtually error-free. With the digitisation of information in the 1990s, telecommunication merged with computers into integrated networks called the internet.

Satellite communication emerged in the 1970s after the USA and the former USSR pioneered space research. Every time you use a cell phone, send an SMS or watch cable television, you use satellite communication. Satellites connect remote corners of the globe and make the unit cost and time of communication independent of distance, so it costs the same to communicate over 500 km as over 5,000 km.

Pause and predict: a satellite phone call costs the same for 500 km and 5,000 km, but a truck delivery does not. What is the reason?

Check your answer: satellite signals cross space, not the ground, so the unit cost and time are independent of the distance between the two ends. A truck consumes fuel and time along every kilometre of the route, so its cost rises with distance.

Cyberspace is the electronic computerised world, encompassed by the internet and the World Wide Web. It exists everywhere: in an office, a sailing boat or a flying plane. Its spread has been unprecedented.

The USA's share of users dropped from 66 per cent in 1995 to 25 per cent in 2005. Now the majority of users are in the USA, U.K., Germany, Japan, China and India. Through e-mail, e-commerce, e-learning and e-governance, cyberspace expands the economic and social space of humans. The textbook concludes that modern communication systems, more than transportation, have made the concept of the global village a reality.

Exam traps

60-second revision

Where this chapter connects

• Previous: Tertiary and Quaternary Activities introduces transport and communication as services that overcome distance.
• Next: International Trade shows how ships, ports and canals carry world trade.
• India link: Transport and Communication in India applies the same modes to Indian roads, railways, waterways, airways and pipelines.