The transportation revolution in the United States began when Americans taking advantage of features of the natural environment to move people and things from place to place began searching for ways to make transport cheaper, faster, and more efficient. Over time a series of technological changes allowed transportation to advance to the point where machines have effectively conquered distance. People can almost effortlessly travel to anywhere in the world and can inexpensively ship raw materials and products across a global market.
But this technology is not ubiquitous, and it is not necessarily democratic. As a famous science fiction writer once said, the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. Modern transportation infrastructure is controlled to a great extent by large corporations, but the benefits of transport are depended on by everyone. And transportation technology itself requires specific conditions such as abundant, cheap, portable energy in the form of fossil fuels, and public infrastructure created by our own and foreign governments, that even those large corporations depend upon but don’t control.
When we think of transportation, it is natural to think first about going places. Getting on a plane in one hemisphere and getting off on the other side of the world is a life-changing opportunity which was unavailable to most people as little as a generation ago, and unthinkable two generations ago. But more crucial to our daily lives than the freedom offered by world travel is the cargo from the other side of the world that reaches us quickly in the holds of jets and more slowly but in almost unimaginable volume in containers on ships. The global transportation of foods, raw materials, and finished goods goes virtually unnoticed in our daily lives, but makes our contemporaryconsumer lifestyle possible.
Explanation: just because
