Transport infrastructure and terri torial planning

摘要

When considering the structural effects of transport infrastructure, it is customary to make a distinction between countries with little such infrastructure and those where it has long existed and extends over the whole territory. In the first of these cases, the structural effects tend to be very strong, at least for projects where reasonable account has been taken of geographical and demographic constraints, economic resources, and the cohesion of a political vision. This was particularly true of the colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries. In countries with older and more developed infrastructure, countless studies have come to the conclusion that transport infrastructure has relatively little effect on the fundamental structures of economic and social life. Not so long ago, at the 94th Round Table of the European Conference of Ministers of Transport (1994), an expert as highly qualified as Francois Plassard, Director of Research at the French National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS), stated that: "in a society where all places are easily accessible, transport no longer has a structural effect." I shall attempt, for my part, to show that this rather sweeping statement is in need of serious qualification.