Sustainable Mountain Development - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 602

established marketplaces show that mountain people have always been engaged in ex-
change, both within the mountains and outside them, and in areas where subsistence
agriculture has dominated local economies. Exchange, and hence access, has always
been integral to subsistence, even in seemingly isolated and secluded mountain areas
whose people have relied on traders for salt and other essential goods.
ROADS AND RAILROADS
Increases in accessibility and the expansion of communications networks have been
driven by industrialization, increasingly sophisticated technologies, and mass mobility
at the global scale. In many mountain areas, access has been improved mainly by ex-
tensive road construction in recent decades, with high-capacity infrastructure linked
to lower-capacity feeder networks. However, the density of access still differs greatly
between mountain regions in industrialized and developing countries. Switzerland's
road network, for example, is nearly 100 times denser per unit area, and 23 times
denser per capita, than that of Ethiopia. One hundred percent accessibility means, in
Switzerland, that every household in a given area reaches its home directly by car;
in Ethiopia, that every household can walk to the next motorable road within a day
(Schaffner and Schaffner 2001). In Ethiopia and other developing countries such as
Afghanistan, China, Nepal, and Peru, access to roads remains worse in mountain than
in nonmountain areas (Huddleston et al. 2003). Railroads have also opened up parts of
mountain areas to extract raw materials, for the development of tourism, and to link
lowland centers of economy, for instance, through the Alps, Pyrenees, Rocky Mountains,
Urals, and southern Andes (Fig. 12.2).