This is a book I’ve wanted to lay my hands on for a long time. The Geography of Transport Systems by Jean-Paul Rodrigue, Claude Comtois and Brian Slack is a book that every geographer with an interest in transportation should read. It is also a book that every transportationist with a sense for geography should read. Even if your main focus is just transportation and nowhere near geography, this book will fascinate, because it so brilliantly explains, explores, researches and reviews the spatial impact of transportation systems and how they have shaped the world that surrounds us. It is not often that I fall in love with textbooks at first sight, and this is a book that will not spend much time collecting dust in my bookshelf, as I will read and use it again and again…
If you can’t use your head, use your overhead
If you, like me, went to school in the late 1980s, you will probably still remember teachers using overhead projectors showing copies of textbook pages with no or little images and reading them verbatim rather than trying to explain things properly? I’m sure the three guys behind this book do not fall into that category, and I know I’d love to be in their classroom. This book fully explains the concepts of transportation, spatial interaction, accessibility, location theory, graph theory and what not better than anything I have seen. Why? because it is so well and to-the-point illustrated. Hardly any concept related to transportation is left out, and hardly any mentioned concept is not well illustrated with rich examples, i.e. self-explanatory figures.
Transportation and supply chains
Transportation networks are the main arteries of society, ensuring a 24/7 operation of the community we live in. Transportation systems are also essential to supply chains. Without a proper transportation system supply chains cannot function properly. However, the menial day-to-day operations related to transportation are often overlooked in supply chain management. This book goes a long way in bridging this gap, as it touches upon topics such as freight transport and locations of terminals. It also extends the term supply chain by introducing a new term: the commodity chain.
Transportation and GIS
If you have read my About Me page, you will probably realize that my fascination for this book stems from my background, as I hold a degree in Geographic Information Systems GIS), focussing on various applications of GIS in transportation (GIS-T). GIS-T only takes up a small part of the book, but it is an excellent chapter on GIS in transportation, as it is co-written by Shih-Lung Shaw, who also co-wrote a book wholly dedicated to GIS-T together with Harvey Miller, one of my professors from the University of Utah.
Companion website
The book comes with a companion website that shows you the main contents of the book. This is where you can see first-hand how brilliantly it is illustrated. If that doesn’t convince you to buy the book, I really don’t know what would. And while most of the illustrations in the book are grayscale only, on the website they are all in full color.
Reference
Rodrigue, J.P., Comtois, C. & Slack, B. (2009) . The Geography of Transport Systems , 2nd edition. New York: Routledge
Author links
- hofstra.edu: Jean-Paul Rodrigue
- umontreal.ca: Claude Comtois
- concordia.ca: Brian Slack
amazon.com
- Buy the book: The Geography of Transport Systems
Related
- husdal.com: GIS for Transportation
- husdal.com: Corridor analysis
- husdal.com: How to make a straight line square
