Studying the traffic rankings of the world's busiest seaports and airports geographers are inclined to look for certain locational qualities or attributes that might help explain the rankings [I]. In this paper the 1995 ranking of the world's top 25 container load centres will be put in simple geographical context. No claim is made that this is the only useful context! It is obvious that the ph…
More than a century ago far-sighted railroad builders and steamship operators were seeking the shortest intermodal itineraries between the eastern United States and the Orient. A combination of locational fact and the factual outcomes of 19thcentury railroad building left Chicago roughly equidistant in railway mileage from what became the four great us West-Coast port complexes in the Los Angel…
A world that shrinks with progressive improvements in transportation andcommunications is a fact of 20th century life. The shrinking process can produce new patterns and perceptions of strategic location. In this paper we are looking specifically at nodes in transportation systems. In the light of transportation progress, we re-consider some of the time-worn ideas about centrality, accessibilit…
In the world’s great seaport cities, the offices of steamship lines were seldom far from the docks. Intuitively, workers in the port community could identify a waterfront and near-waterfront domain where most of their daily affairs with ships and cargoes occurred. This we have called the shipping district. It was a distinct but not an exclusive domain, since it was shared by other commercial …