Free Essay Highlighting the Effects of Transportation Industry on the Environment

Transportation industry includes and not limited to road, railway, sea, and air. Transportation helps to speedily reduce the time spent on travel thus saving time. However, this comes with a negative impact on the environment. One of the major impacts of the transportation industry on the environment is air pollution. When components of transport (such as vehicle), are moving, they produce exhaust fumes which contain carbon monoxide, dust, and aldehydes. These gases as harmful to human beings and also contribute to global warming. Furthermore, Sulphur dioxide which is also one of the components in exhausts fumes causes acidic rains. Acidic rains damage sails as well as eroding paints on houses.

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The other effect is noise pollution. When trains, vehicles, and airplanes are moving a lot of noise is produced. This noise comes from horns, brake squeal, planes taking off, loud music systems and loose loads, just to mention a few. Besides, land is damaged by transportation industry. This includes damage to soil structure when constructing roads, railways and airports and use of large tracks of lands in airports that would rather be used for agriculture or forestry. The areas where pipes go through, despite some being underground, cannot be used for other purposes such as agriculture. Additionally, when there are leakages in pipeline the soil is left with harmful chemicals.

Lastly, there is high energy consumption in transport industry which directly causes pollution. In order for a vehicle to move, fuel is burnt which requires conversation of energy. The more the energy is converted, the more the waste products are produced. Besides, the energy used in vehicle operations and to some extent vehicle manufacturing, increase the amount of green gas in the atmosphere. Thus transport industry contributes to a greater extent the effects of global warming.

How Supply and Demand drive the transportation industry

Transportation, unlike the goods and services that are transported, cannot be stored and thus needs to be utilized immediately. In transportation, there must be mobility over infrastructure such as roads in order to complete a transport supply. In this industry, there are suppliers of transport and those in demand of the transport. Transport supply includes infrastructure (capacity), network (coverage) and services (frequency). Demand, on the other hand, are the people or things that need transportation. Demand is thus in terms of the number of people, volume or tons of goods to be transported in a particular time and space.

Supply and demand in transportation have inverse relationship. Transport demand cannot take place without transport supply but on the contrary, transport supply can exist even in the instance where there is no demand. For instance, public airline services continue to run even when the demand is not sufficient. Additionally, supply is most of the time designed at a higher capacity than the expected base, to cater for demand in case it increases.

Demand and supply in transportation interact economic wise until an equilibrium is reached between quantity of transport market is willing to pay a given price and the quantity of transport being supplied at that given price. Change of price affects demand and makes it shift towards other modes, routes or other periods. Furthermore, long term price changes can affect the locations of businesses by particular individuals. However, the shift in demand depends on the public sector, elasticity and entry costs.