Transport terminals

Text 5

All spatial flows, with the exception of personal vehicular and pedestrian trips, involve movements between terminals. With these two exceptions, all transport modes require assembly and distribution of their traffic, both passenger and freight. For example, passengers have to go to bus terminals and airports first in order to reach their final destinations, and freight has to be consolidated at a port or a rail yard before onward shipment. Terminals are, therefore, essential links in transportation chains. The goal of this chapter is to examine the strong spatial and functional character of transport terminals. They occupy specific locations and they exert a strong influence over their surroundings. At the same time they perform specific economic functions and serve as foci for clusters of specialized services.

A terminal may be defined as any facility where freight and passengers are assembled or dispersed. They may be points of interchange involving the same mode of transport. Thus, a passenger wishing to travel by train from Paris to Antwerp may have to change in Brussels, or an air passenger wishing to fly between Montreal and Winnipeg may have to change planes in Toronto. They may also be points of interchange between different modes of transport, so that goods being shipped from the US Mid-West to the Ruhr in Germany may travel by rail from Cincinnati to the port of New York, be put on a ship to Rotterdam, and then placed on a barge for delivery to Duisberg. Transport terminals, therefore, are central and intermediate locations in the movements of passengers and freight.

In order to carry out the transfer and bundling of freight and passengers, specific equipment and infrastructures are required. Differences in the nature, composition and timing of transfer activities give rise to significant differentiations in the form and function between terminals. A basic distinction is between passenger and freight transfers, because in order to carry out the transfer and bundling of each type, specific equipment and infrastructures are required.

With one exception, passenger terminals require relatively little specific equipment. This is because individual mobility is the means by which passengers access buses, ferries or trains. Certainly, services such as information, shelter, food and security are required, but the layouts and activities taking place in passenger terminals tend to be simple and require relatively little equipment. They may appear congested at certain times of the day, but the flows of people can be managed successfully with good design of platforms and access points, and with appropriate scheduling of arrivals and departures. The amount of time passengers spend in such terminals tends to be brief. As a result bus termini and railway stations tend to be made up of simple components, from ticket offices and waiting areas to limited amounts of retailing.

Airports are of a different order. They are among the most complex of terminals functionally. Moving people through an airport has become a very significant problem, not least because of security concerns. Passengers may spend several hours in transit, with check-in and security checks on departure, and baggage pick up and in many cases customs and immigration on arrival. Planes may be delayed for a multitude of reasons. The result is that a wide range of services have to be provided for passengers not directly related to the transfer function, including restaurants, bars, stores, hotels, in addition to the activities directly related to operations such as check-in halls, passenger loading ramps and baggage handling facilities. At the same time, airports have to provide for the very specific needs of the aircraft, from runways to maintenance facilities, from fire protection to air traffic control.

Measurement of activities in passenger terminals is generally straightforward. The most common indicator is the number of passengers handled, sometimes differentiated according to arrivals and departures. Transfer passengers are counted twice (once on arrival, once on departure), and so airports that serve as major transfer facilities inevitably record high passenger totals. A further measure of airport activity is number of aircraft movements, a figure that must be used with some caution because it pays no regard to the capacity of planes. High numbers of aircraft movements may not be correlated with passenger traffic totals.

Freight handling requires specific loading and unloading equipment. In addition to the facilities required to accommodate ships, trucks and trains (berths, loading bays and freight yards respectively), a very wide range of handling gear is required that is determined by the kinds of cargoes handled. The result is that terminals are differentiated functionally both by the mode involved and the commodities transferred. A basic distinction is that between bulk and general cargo:

• bulk refers to goods that are handled in large quantities that are unpackaged and are available in uniform dimensions. Liquid bulk goods include crude oil and refined products that can be handled using pumps to move the product along hoses and pipes. Relatively limited handling equipment is needed, but significant storage facilities may be required. Dry bulk includes a wide range of products, such as ores, coal and cereals. More equipment for dry bulk handling is required, because the material may have to utilize specialized grabs and cranes and conveyer-belt systems;

• general cargo refers to goods that are of many shapes, dimensions and weights, such as machinery and parts. Because the goods are so uneven and irregular, handling is difficult to mechanize. General cargo handling usually requires a lot of labor.

A feature of most freight activity is the need for storage. Assembling the individual bundles of goods may be time-consuming and thus some storage may be required. This produces the need for terminals to be equipped with specialized infrastructures such as grain silos, storage tanks, and refrigerated warehouses, or simply space to stockpile. Measurement of freight traffic through terminals is more complicated than for passengers. Because freight is so diverse, standard measures of weight and value are difficult to compare and combine. Because bulk cargoes are inevitably weighty, terminals specialized in such cargoes will inevitably record higher throughputs measured in tons than others more specialized in general cargoes. The reverse may be true if the value of commodities handled is the measure employed. The problem of measurement involving weight or volume becomes very difficult when many types of freight are handled, because one is adding together goods that are inherently unequal. Care must be taken in interpreting the significance of freight traffic totals, therefore. The difficulty of comparing traffic totals of different commodities has led to attempts to “weight” cargoes based upon some indication of the value added they contribute to the terminal. The most famous is the so-called “Bremen” rule. This was developed in 1982 by the port of Bremen and was based on a survey of the labor cost incurred in the handling of one ton of different cargoes. The results found that handling one ton of general cargo equals three tons of dry bulk and 12 tons of liquid bulk. Although this is the most widely used method, other “rules” have been developed by individual ports, such as Rotterdam, and more recently by the port of Antwerp. The “Antwerp rule” indicates that the highest value added is the handling of fruit. Using this as a benchmark, forest products handling requires 3.0 tons to provide the same value added as fruit, cars 1.5 tons, containers 7 tons, cereals 12 tons, and crude oil 47 tons.

Дата добавления: 2014-11-29