Transportation corridors in North America (Essay Sample)

Transportation corridors in North America
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Introduction
A transportation corridor is a linear space or tract of land occupied by one main and developed transportation system that tends to connect major transport destinations such as cities, towns, harbors and airports (EIA, 2011). The existing main transport system may be the railway line, a road or even a canal. When one main transport system is well established, other systems are built alongside it to minimize the pollution of other areas and to avoid population displacement in other areas. In most cases you will find that the railway system is the main transport system and the roads are built alongside the railway system. Thus, the whole system of the railway line and the road system are called a corridor. In most cases, well pronounced corridors are found in the developed countries such as the European countries and the American States. This is as a result of long term gradual development since the evolution of the transport systems in earlier years unlike in developing nations such as the African and Asian countries where the transport systems started to develop in recent years. Some of the transport corridors that are well developed are; the midcontinent corridors, East west corridors, Pan European corridors, southeast high speed rail corridor etc (Rodrigue, Slack & Blank, 2011). This paper is focusing on the North American transport corridors. Briefly it will have to show evolution of these corridors, the economic importance of these corridors, the challenges or barriers to these kinds of systems, and the future prospects, of these systems.
As we have mentioned earlier, the developed transport corridors like these ones of North America did not just develop spontaneously. The systems have undergone long term evolution and have taken several decades to reach at the current states, in fact their developmental history dates back to 1960s (Rodrigue, Slack & Blank, 2011). The factors behind their gradual evolution are the advancement in technology and the change in the socio economic settings in the society. Transport corridors all over the world are receiving much attention by the policy makers since they have proved to be the backbone of the economies of many countries. In fact, countries that have well developed corridors like those ones in the North America have strong economic power, thus, their economies (EIA, 2011). This is because their markets, production places, and exporting terminus are well linked thus, are always stable efficient and steady supply of raw materials and finished products to the markets. Corridors may be formal or functional, but for a country to realize the full benefits of corridors, they must adopt both formal and functional.
North America has several corridors some of them were developed long time ago and others is when they have been integrated in the already existing ones to improve their efficiency. Examples of the North America trans-border corridors are; Toronto-Windsor-Detroit-Chicago corridor, Vancouver-Seattle corridor and Montreal-New York Corridor (Rodrigue, Slack &Blank, 2011). These corridors connect several States of the US and they are considered the main ones that steers the economic growth of the United States. Vogel (2006) points out that globalization scale have resulted in an environment that has compelled the transport sector to strive to adapt and cope up with expanding Geographical distribution. From the history, North America is known for its strategic position for corridors, gateways and harbors; this led to the easier access to the continent’s resources and the market expansion (Vogel, 2006). The result of this was that it was made to be a functional region which had a comparative advantage over other regions. Thus, unlike other regions in the world, this region integration is not only about trade, but also functionally integrated supply chains.
Some of the factors that enable these corridors to be economic boasters are; their greater capacity in supporting the volumes of trade in regard of the economies of scale principle (Vogel, 2006). This means that there are always fewer costs as compared to the reputations from the whole process of trading. In fact, this is the most important factor that pushes the countries to develop transport corridors. Secondly, corridors provides better integration between distribution and production in regard to the time and cost efficiency. Here the corridors acts as the main supply chain which are composed of inland ports and gateways. The last factor is that corridors have a greater reliability of distribution due to its transport performance (Rodrigue, Slack & Blank, 2011). This has been boosted by coordinated governance through the identification of critical infrastructure and the efficiency of the transnational corridors.
There are also factors that are curtailing the efficiency of transport corridors in North America. First we have frequent congestion of these corridors due to the heavy usage. This factor always leads to capacity limits; this means that the corridors do not serve their purpose to their full capacity due to delays caused by congestions (Rodrigue, Comtois &Slack, 2011). Secondly, along thes...