Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of transportation is key to facilitating the accessibility of a particular location. The following sections
give some examples of how businesses use accessibility to their benefit.
Hub-and-spokes networks
Nowadays, virtually every airline employs a hub-and-spokes network in which passengers or freight
fly from different locations to a central point (
hub
), where transfer is made to another plane to reach
the final destination (
spoke
). While this inevitably involves more travel time versus a non-stop direct
flight between the points of origin and final destination, it also affords accessibility between all points
in the route system and income maximization to the carrier.
Federal Express, for example, the company that pioneered the overnight package delivery business,
operates a hub in Memphis, Tennessee (Figure 15-6). In the middle of the night, company aircraft
from all over America bring their packages to Memphis, where they are swapped between planes
that then return to their points of origin in time for morning deliveries. Thus, each night a company
airplane departs from, say, New Orleans with packages destined for cities all over the country. But
instead of delivering the goods “Santa Claus-style,” going to each city one by one, the aircraft goes
to just one place — Memphis, Tennessee.
Aircraft from dozens of other cities do the same thing, dropping off packages destined for New Or-
leans and elsewhere, and then picking up packages from New Orleans and elsewhere before making
the flight back home. Thus, while it may seem a bit weird that a package sent from New Orleans
to Phoenix makes the trip via Memphis, the network design promotes accessibility between multiple
locations using a minimum of aircraft that fly a minimum number of segments. And that promotes
profitability.
Figure 15-6:
Memphis, Ten-
nessee, is the
principal hub of
the Federal Ex-
press route sys-
tem.
