Unit 1

Components in Transportation systems

Pretest

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 Lesson 1

Fundamentals of Transportation

Learning Outcomes
At the end of the lesson, you should be able to:
 Explain all modes and components of transportation.
 Understand the basic information about the integration of
transportation types.

Transportation
 Moves people and goods
from one place to another
using a variety of vehicles
across different
infrastructure systems.
 It does this using not only
technology (namely
vehicles, energy, and
infrastructure), but also
people’s time and effort.
 Producing not only the
desired outputs of
passenger trips and freight
shipments, but also adverse
outcomes such as air
pollution, noise, congestion,
crashes, injuries, and
fatalities.
 Figure 1 illustrates the inputs, outputs, and outcomes of
transportation. In the upper left are
traditional inputs (infrastructure Fig. 1 Transportation inputs and
including pavements, bridges, outputs
etc.), labor required to produce
transportation, land consumed by infrastructure, energy inputs, and
vehicles).
 On the top of the figure are Information, Operations, and
Management, and Traveler’s Time and Effort.
 Transportation systems serve people, and are created by people,
both the system owners and operators, who run, manage, and
maintain the system and travelers who use it.
 On the upper right side of the figure are the adverse outcomes of
transportation, in particular its negative externalities.

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  by polluting, systems consume health and increase morbidity and
mortality;
 by being dangerous, they consume safety and produce injuries and
fatalities;
 by being loud they consume quiet and produce noise (decreasing
quality of life and property values); and
 by emitting carbon and other pollutants, they harm the
environment.

Modalism and Inter-modalism

 Transportation is often divided into infrastructure modes: e.g.
highway, rail, water, pipeline and air.
 Highways include different vehicle types: cars, buses, trucks,
motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians.
 Transportation can be further separated into freight and passenger,
and urban and inter-city. Passenger transportation is divided in
public (or mass) transit (bus, rail, commercial air) and private
transportation (car, taxi, general aviation).
 These modes of course intersect and interconnect. At-grade
crossings of railroads and highways, inter-modal transfer facilities
(ports, airports, terminals, stations).
 Transportation is usually considered to be between buildings (or from
one address to another), although many of the same concepts
apply within buildings. The operations of an elevator and bus have a
lot in common, as do a forklift in a warehouse and a crane at a port.

Transportation Economics/Introduction

 Transportation systems are subject to constraints and face questions

of resource allocation. The topics of supply and demand, as well as
equilibrium and disequilibrium, arise and give shape to the use and
capability of the system.

What is Transportation Economics?

 Transport Economics studies the movement of people and goods

over space and time. Historically it has been thought of as located
at the intersection of microeconomics and civil engineering.
 Topics traditionally associated with transport economics include
privatization, nationalization, regulation, pricing, economic stimulus,
financing, funding, expenditures, demand, production, and
externalities.

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