2 Facts About Transportation Geography for Students in Logistics Training

It’s hard to understate the importance of logistics and transportation. From Rome’s famous network of roads to the earliest steam-powered trains, transportation has played a vital role in helping societies thrive. The essential role that logistics professionals occupy is just as important, if not more important, today. In today’s globalized world, shipments can often travel great distances, beginning their journey on one continent and ending up on another.

Ensuring that shipments complete their journey smoothly is no easy task. It takes a keen understanding of a number of different subjects, including everything from negotiating contracts to evaluating costs, and more. Even customer service and project management skills are needed to thrive in this busy sector. For aspiring professionals-in-the-making, a keen understanding of transportation geography is also more than a little essential. Understanding transportation geography helps provide the theoretical knowledge and context that logistics professionals often use when making important decisions.

Here’s a quick taste of what transportation geography includes.

Transportation Geography Is Made of Nodes, Networks, and Demand

When it comes to understanding transportation geography, there’s a lot to take in when you study logistics. Transportation geography is a complex field that examines many different topics. It can examine the environmental impact transport routes may have. It can examine how transport routes affect population density in certain areas. It could even look into how cost and new technology change how portable different items become.

However, at the very centre of transportation geography lies three essential elements: nodes, networks, and demand. Nodes include both the point of origin of a shipment and its destination. For example, if a shipment was being sent from Vancouver to Toronto, both cities would be considered nodes. Networks, on the other hand, are the routes and infrastructure that the shipments must travel along. Highways, roads, and train lines are all a part of the infrastructure that makes up networks. Demand simply refers to how much certain routes are used to transport goods, or how popular different types of transportation may be.

Pros With Logistics Training Know There Are Many Different Transport Modes

Transport modes are another important part of transportation geography. Transportation modes refer to the different kinds of transportation that can be used to move shipments. This can include trains, trucks, planes, and ships.

Each of these different modes comes with its own unique advantages and drawbacks. For example, planes might be quick at transporting goods, but the cost of using them is high. They also aren’t always an ideal solution for deliveries to smaller towns or villages that might not have an airport nearby. Ships, on the other hand, can transport vast amounts of goods and are also cost effective. However, they’re also much slower than other forms of transportation. Trucks help shipments reach more remote areas, but they can get caught in traffic. Often, professionals with logistics training will use several different modes to get shipments from one destination to another. To bring a shipment from Japan to Toronto, for example, cargo will likely need to travel by boat, train, and then by truck to reach its final destination. For those working in logistics, the critical thinking and problem solving that comes with these types of considerations makes this career one that is stimulating as well as rewarding.

Are you interested in a career that pays well and is in demand?

Learn more about how the supply chain & logistics program at Anderson College can help you reach your goals.