Class 12 Geography Chapter 7 Transport and Communication Notes in English

1 Transport Network and Modes of Transportation

Resources, economic activities and markets are almost never found in the same place. Transport, communication and trade are what link the places that produce goods to the places that consume them. In earlier times, transport and communication were carried by the same means, for instance a messenger travelling by road. Today the two have become distinct and specialised: transport moves people and goods, communication moves information.

The world’s transport moves by four principal modes: land, water, air and pipelines. Every mode except pipelines carries both passengers and freight. Which mode is used for a given job depends on three things: the type of goods or services being moved, the cost of transport, and which mode is actually available.

2 Land Transport: Roads and Highways

Most of the world’s movement of goods and services happens over land. The story of land transport is really the story of what people used to carry loads before machines existed.

2.1 How Land Transport Developed

The first public railway line opened in 1825, between Stockton and Darlington in northern England, and railways became the most popular, fastest form of transport through the nineteenth century. Newer developments in land transport include pipelines, ropeways and cableways. Ropeways are found on steep mountain slopes and in mines, where building a road is not practical. As a rule, the old, elementary forms of transport, human porters, pack animals and carts, are the most expensive per unit carried, while large modern freighters (railways, ocean vessels, motor trucks, pipelines) are the cheapest. Even so, in the densely populated districts of India and China, overland transport by human porters and hand-pulled carts is still common.

2.2 Roads

Road transport is the most economical mode for short distances, and it is the only mode that offers true door-to-door service. But unmetalled roads, though cheap to build, become unmotorable in the rainy season, and even metalled roads are badly affected by heavy rain and floods. Where the rail network is too small to serve a large developing country cheaply, roads carry most of a nation’s trade, commerce and tourism.

Road quality varies greatly between developed and developing countries, because road building and maintenance both need heavy spending. Developed countries have motorways, autobahns (Germany) and inter-state highways for fast, long-distance travel. The world’s total motorable road length is only about 15 million km, and North America alone accounts for 33% of it. North America also has the highest road density and the highest number of vehicles of any continent.

2.3 Highways

Europe has a well-developed highway network and a large number of vehicles, but its highways face strong competition from railways and waterways.

2.4 Border Roads

3 Railways of the World

Railways are the land-transport mode best suited to carrying bulky goods and passengers over long distances within a country. Railway gauges vary by country: broad gauge (more than 1.5 m), standard gauge (1.44 m, used in the U.K.), metre gauge (1 m), and smaller gauges. Commuter trains that carry millions of passengers to and fro within a city are very popular in the U.K., U.S.A., Japan and India. Worldwide, about 13 lakh km of railway is open for traffic.

4 Trans-Continental Railways

5 Water Transport: Sea Routes, Canals and Inland Waterways

Water transport needs no route construction at all: the oceans are already linked, and any size of ship can use them. It is much cheaper than land transport, because the friction of water is far less than that of land, so the energy cost is lower too. Modern ships carry radar, wireless and other navigation aids; refrigerated chambers, tankers and containers have made carrying perishable and bulk cargo much easier. Water transport is divided into sea routes and inland waterways.

5.1 Important Sea Routes

5.2 The Suez and Panama Canals

The Suez and the Panama Canals are the two great man-made shipping canals of the world, often called the “gateways of commerce” between the eastern and western halves of the globe.

When the tolls on a canal cost more than the delay is worth, some ships still choose the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope instead of paying to use the Suez Canal.

5.3 Inland Waterways

Rivers, canals, lakes and coastal backwaters have carried cargo and passengers by boat and steamer since ancient times. How useful a waterway is depends on its navigability: the width and depth of the channel, the continuity of its water flow, and the transport technology available. Very heavy cargo, coal, cement, timber and metallic ores, travels well by inland waterway, and rivers remain the only way to move goods through dense forest. In India, riverways were once the main highways of transport, but lost importance to railway competition, water diverted for irrigation, and poor maintenance. Where a river is worth developing, countries dredge it, stabilise its banks, and build dams and barrages to regulate its flow.

6 Air Transport

Air transport is the fastest but also the costliest mode of transport. It is the preferred choice for long-distance passenger travel and for moving valuable cargo quickly, and it is often the only way to reach an inaccessible area: an airplane can carry goods to Eskimos in Northern Canada across frozen ground, and in the Himalayan region, when routes are blocked by landslides, avalanches or heavy snowfall, air travel is the only alternative. Air transport also has real strategic and defence importance.

The U.K. pioneered commercial jet transport; the U.S.A. built up large-scale international civil aviation after the Second World War. Today more than 250 commercial airlines offer regular service worldwide. Building and running an airport is expensive: hangars, landing, fuelling and maintenance facilities all cost money, so airports have developed more in highly industrialised countries with heavy traffic.

6.1 Inter-Continental Air Routes

In the Northern Hemisphere there is a distinct east-west belt of inter-continental air routes, densest over Eastern U.S.A., Western Europe and South-east Asia. The nodal points where routes converge and radiate to every continent are: New York, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Rome, Moscow, Karachi, New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Chicago. By contrast, Africa, the Asiatic part of Russia and South America lack good air services, and services are limited between 10° and 35° latitude in the Southern Hemisphere, where population is sparser and landmass and economic development are both limited.

7 Pipelines

Pipelines carry liquids and gases: water, petroleum, natural gas, even liquefied coal, in an uninterrupted flow, without needing a vehicle at all. Cooking gas (LPG) reaches homes through pipelines in many parts of the world, and in New Zealand, milk itself travels from farms to factories by pipeline.

8 Communications and the Internet

Long before satellites, the telegraph and the telephone were humanity’s main long-distance communication tools. The telegraph helped colonise the American West; in the early-to-mid twentieth century, the American Telegraph and Telephone Company (AT&T) held a monopoly over the U.S. telephone industry, and the telephone became a genuine factor in America’s urbanisation: firms centralised at city headquarters and kept only branch offices in smaller towns. The telephone remains the most widely used mode of communication even today, and in developing countries, cell phones, made possible by satellites, matter enormously for rural connectivity.

The first major modern breakthrough was the optic fibre cable (OFC). Facing rising competition, telephone companies everywhere upgraded their old copper-cable systems to optic fibre, which carries huge amounts of data rapidly, securely and almost error-free. In the 1990s, the digitisation of information merged telecommunication with computers to create the integrated network we call the Internet.

8.1 Satellite Communication

Satellite communication became a real field of its own in the 1970s, after the U.S.A. and the former U.S.S.R. pioneered space research. Artificial satellites in Earth’s orbit connect even the remotest corners of the globe. The key idea examiners test is this: satellites made the cost and time of communication invariant with distance, so it costs exactly the same to talk over 500 km as over 5,000 km via satellite. Every cell-phone call, SMS and cable-television broadcast today uses satellite communication somewhere in the chain.

Later satellites, including Bhaskar and INSAT I-B, made long-distance communication, television and radio genuinely effective. Today’s television weather forecasting is one direct result.

8.2 Cyberspace and the Internet

The Internet is today the largest electronic network on the planet, connecting about 1,000 million people across more than 100 countries. But where its users live has changed sharply: the U.S.A.’s share of world internet users fell from 66% in 1995 to just 25% in 2005, and the majority of users today are spread across the U.S.A., U.K., Germany, Japan, China and India. As billions come online, cyberspace keeps expanding the economic and social space of humans through e-mail, e-commerce, e-learning and e-governance.