Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 5.1
World's 20 largest airports, 2005
Airport
City
Country
Passengers (millions)
Hartsfield
Atlanta
U.S.A.
85.9
O'Hare
Chicago
U.S.A.
76.8
Heathrow
London
U.K.
67.9
Haneda
Tokyo
Japan
63.3
Dallas/Ft.Worth
Dallas
U.S.A.
59.1
Charles de Gaulle
Paris
France
53.6
Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Germany
52.2
McCarran
Las Vegas
U.S.A.
44.3
Schiphol
Amsterdam
Netherlands
44.2
Denver Int'l
Denver
U.S.A.
43.3
Barajas
Madrid
Spain
41.9
Sky Harbor
Phoenix
U.S.A.
41.2
Capital
Beijing
China
41.0
JFK
New York
U.S.A.
40.6
Check Lap Kok
Hong Kong
China
40.3
George Bush
Houston
U.S.A.
39.7
Bangkok Int'l
Bangkok
Thailand
39.0
Minneapolis/
St. Paul
Minneapolis
U.S.A.
37.6
Wayne Co.
Detroit
U.S.A.
36.4
Source: Airline Business
2006.
tourism and the ability of people to consume far-away places. Global tourism
arrivals rose by 83 percent between 1990 and 2005—to 808 million people, or
15 percent of the planet—and receipts rose by 119 percent, making it the
world's largest industry in terms of employment. Easy access to far-away
places inevitably commodi
ed and homogenized them; as travel writer Pico
Iyer (1995: 51) notes, “Mass travel has made L.A. contiguous to Seoul and
adjacent to Sao Paulo, and has made all of them feel a little like bedroom
communities for Tokyo.” The largest tourist market, Europe, greatly exceeded
other regions (Table 5.2); however, growth in the less developed world was
generally higher.
Despite advances in land and air travel, maritime transportation remains
unequaled in its capacity to carry freight cheaply over long distances. Mari-
time shipping, like virtually every other industry, has become
fi
fi
firmly inter-
nationalized. Kumar and Hu
mann (2002:36), for example, note that “A
Greek owned vessel, built in Korea, may be chartered to a Danish operator,
who employs Philippine seafarers via a Cypriot crewing agent, is registered
in Panama, insured in the U.K., and transports German-made cargo in the
name of a Swiss freight forwarder from a Dutch port to Argentina, through
terminals that are concessioned to port operators from Hong Kong and
Australia.” As shipping companies strove to realize ever-larger economies
of scale, many ships exceed the capacities of the Panama and Suez canals,
resulting in post-Panamax and post-Suezmax vessels, respectively. Because
ff
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