Editorial: Transport horizons

JTH 36.1 June 2015

Editorial

Transport horizons


Various notions of 'horizon' permeate the history of transport and mobility. A yearning to go beyond the horizon is an impulse shared by toddlers, adolescents and adult adventurers, and by many more anchored people seeking temporary distractions and novelty elsewhere.
In relation to the transport past, the horizon heaves into view well in relation to seafaring over vast expanses of open ocean. Scanning the horizon through a telescope was about navigation and safety. 'Capturing the horizon' – as one book title has it – animated a great deal of curiosity and need that propelled exploration, conquest and trade, and that impelled transport engineering for long-distance transport operations. Conversely, being held captive by a notional horizon may be read into many narratives about escape.
The horizon is not itself a fixed object, of course. It can be drawn and photographed, but is intangible. It is never sealed, and can never be subdued. On a (nearly) spherical planet it is forever reformulating itself in the eyes of people on the move. They never reach or cross it, even though stationary viewers watching a departing vehicle, vessel or aircraft will watch it becoming smaller as it disappears over their horizon. At its destination, stationary spectators see the same speck-like carrier enlarging as it emerges from beyond their horizon.
A less literal sense of mutable horizon has long been embedded into the activity of transportation and its reportage via the idea that travel broadens the mind by widening personal encounters, experiences and knowledge. The horizon remains a limitation, but metaphorically. Strictly, widening one's horizon(s) requires only elevation (in a tree, tall building, or balloon), but it is movement along a horizontal plane that transports one to different places. The history of aviation is partly about gravity-defying verticality, but it is also about lateral movement on a horizontal plane which is more easily comprehended as spherical rather than flat. Aviation certainly widened horizons, both literally and metaphorically. Rocketry and space travel introduced an altogether different order of horizontality in which sight of the entire circumference of the Earth provides the widest possible view of its horizon.
Three papers in this issue of the JTH invoke the idea that surface transportation widened personal and social horizons. Major's paper shows that railway agents in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s collaborated with railway companies to create mass tourist mobility for the working classes. Their horizons widened from hearth, factory and field to faraway places of entertainment and instruction. Law's paper discusses how charabanc road transport offered relatively flexible, fast and affordable leisure mobility to working class people in 1930s Britain. Some charabanc stops also began to dissolve narrow social-class horizons. Widening horizons was not the objective of Greek emigration policy after World War II but, as Limnios-Sekeris reveals, Greeks fleeing unemployment at home and wanting to make new lives in Australia stretched their horizons considerably. They did so courtesy of arranged shipping line and airline transport, albeit not always in choice and leisured ways.
Allusions to the horizon as threshold of imagination and life, and as movement in conformity with its plane, are not the only elements of horizontality in transport history. A rather more furtive notion of horizon lurks behind policy ambitions and investment goals. Partly metaphorical, and partly literal, the horizon remains a target, and a declared review and decision point, not something that is forever receding. Transport planning and policy horizons comprise more-or-less explicit visions and measurable targets. They include time frames and geographies, and would express ambitions such as building a road into remote territory before a political election. Transport investment horizons would express the period over which capital loans are raised and repaid, and by which profits are expected to be generated within some socio-technical regime. Many transport investments are in infrastructure and services which service distant destinations and therefore include that spatial element of horizontality.
Three other papers in this JTH issue work with this more arcane notion of transport horizon. Sahi's analysis of the varying use made of the 10,000 km railway corridor across Russia between Finland and Japan during and after turbulent political times speaks to geographically extensive and lengthy investment horizons held by multiple stakeholders. Vahrenkamp's study of the failure of experimental truck outsourcing under centralised state socialism in the German Democratic Republic between 1957 and 1980 is an instance of grand transport visioning within the boundaries of just one country. The ideological horizon was a chimera, and there came a point when not reaching it ended the dream. So too, in New Zealand, Brett explains how the hope that sub-national localities could shoulder the responsibility of railway investment in the nineteenth century foundered on reckless and selfish spending within narrow provincial horizons.
In all their senses, transport horizons have been and remain mercurial. Transport-dependent horizons have shrunk. Far and close have been reconfigured: so much information comes to us rather than having to be fetched, and there is unprecedented mobility of people and freight. Long range affordable transport is no longer the key limitation to wider horizons on Earth. The risk-reward horizon of future transport is another matter. Just as in the past, time horizons and geopolitical horizons will mutate, fundamentally affecting how transport is imagined, designed and installed, how it performs, and what it can achieve. The horizons of transport history may be expected to shift accordingly.


Gordon Pirie
Editor








James E. Vance, Capturing the Horizon: the Historical Geography of Transportation (New York, Harper & Row, 1986).