Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
portray them, on the one hand, as harmless, apolitical investors facilitating a
comparative advantage, and as brutally exploitative parasites on the other.
The post-war boom, and the TNCs that it propelled it, were sustained by
revolutions in transportation in air, land, and sea that greatly reduced trans-
port costs and intensi
ed international competition. The containerization of
freight transport dramatically lowered shipping, rail, and trucking costs and
accelerated the circuits of capital accumulation. Containerization, which
began in Port Newark, New Jersey in 1956, permits the mechanized handling
of diverse cargoes as they are loaded into standardized boxes, greatly expedit-
ing the process of loading and unloading ships and trucks, reducing labor
inputs signi
fi
cantly (Herod 1998) and seamlessly integrating land and water
transportation through roll-on roll-off
fi
ferries. Containerships could be loaded
and unloaded rapidly—in as little as eight hours—using gantry cranes. This
reduction in time, with associated savings in operating costs, generated a wave
of capital intensi
ff
cation in ports, reducing the need for stevedores. In its
reliance on economies of scale, containerization favored the growth of large
ports over smaller ones, encouraging a centralization of shipping services in a
few key selected cities (Robinson 2002).
Similarly, air transportation underwent a parallel revolution in the wake of
jet propulsion. Transatlantic
fi
flights, which required roughly 17 hours in the
1930s, saw that time reduced to ten hours by 1947 with the introduction of
the DC-6. In increasing average
fl
fl
flight speeds, jets facilitated a market
fi
first for
corporate elites and then in mass aviation-based tourism. The
fi
first jet planes
crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 1959 and signi
cantly decreased the cost of air
travel. Within one year, the volume of air passengers across the Atlantic
surpassed that by ship. Planes such as the DC-3 were capable of staying in the
air for sustained periods and thus reaching areas that were cost-ine
fi
ff
ective for
less e
cient planes. Travel times between New York and Los Angeles declined
from 15 to seven hours between 1946 and 1973. The rise of a global airline
network in the 1960s placed almost any location within 36 hours' travel time
of New York or London. By the 1970s, jumbo jets, such as the Boeing 747,
elevated the number of passengers signi
cantly, fueling the long-distance
market for tourists and business travelers employed by the international
economy's growing number of producer services. By 1970, supersonic planes
had been developed, exceeding 760 mph at sea level or 650 mph in the strato-
sphere, although most jets
fi
fly just below the speed of sound, Mach 1.
Increases in the speed of aircraft were complemented by incremental changes
in airport design, weather detection, and ground access.
Mass air travel began in earnest in the 1960s, fueled by rising disposable
incomes and vacation times as well as a division of labor in which corporate
networks became increasingly dispersed over long distances. In the process,
time-space compression became an increasingly ordinary experience for large
numbers of people. As
fl
flying became increasingly accepted among the public,
distances between pairs of cities were conceptualized with increasing fre-
quency in terms of hours rather than absolute distances. As travel times and
fl
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