Transportation and the Experience of Travel
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4487159 |
|---|---|
| Authors | William R Siddall (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1987 |
| Volume | 77 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 309 |
| Publication date | 1987-07-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Geographical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-7428 • E-ISSN: 1931-0846 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/214122 |
| OpenAlex | W1976765273 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
Improvements in transportation over the years have consistently diminished the experience of traveling. Many writers have noted that the progression from horses and bicycles to high-speed automobiles and airliners has reduced the rewards of travel. Because traveling can be an enjoyable and humanizing experience, transportation should be modified to benefit travelers. EXPERIENCING a new place can be exciting, and it should be fun. Travel to such a place should be stimulating and enjoyable. But is it? In early times travel was often an arduous and even dangerous undertaking. The French antecedent, travail, means exhausting labor or exertion. Over the years travel has become easier and easier, until today it may have become so easy that it provides little pleasure and substance. There must have been a happier midpoint in this progression, a time when the traveler no longer had to fear bandits and pirates or to be battered and bruised in a stagecoach, yet not a period when travel was largely a process of being hurtled through space in a sealed container. What is the best mode of travel has always been a debatable point, and sensitive and curious travelers have often vigorously objected to new forms of transportation that they consider to provide less rewarding journeys. Generally they have complained that a new or improved facility tended to separate them from the land that they were passing through, that the route was limiting and perhaps its construction had damaged the view, or that the trip went so fast and so far that a traveler was numbed. Travelers who reacted with disapproval to each new improvement in transportation might have been manifesting the normal human resistance to change, or they might have been most soberly agreeing with the philosophical observation by Ogden Nash that progress is all very well, only it's gone on too long. After a lifetime of travel to remote corners of the world, my father wrote to me of his childhood in rural Ohio at the beginning of the twentieth century. When I was a little boy you could see the landscape only by walking or bicycling or by horse and buggy or train. Walking and bicycling, especially as there were very few good roads, were very limited in compass. Horse and buggy were less so, but still quite limited and also very expensive. Railroads, aside from the dirt, flying cinders and romance, were pretty much as they are today: you saw a margin of the countryside, but it wasn't very real, and it certainly was not representative. The result was a Mystery of Landscape. Just going on some road a little further * DR. SIDDALL is a professor of geography at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas
Advertising · Business · Geography · Transport engineering · Engineering · Travel Writing and Literature
| Citations per year | 0.31 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2010 - 2017 (8) |
| Highly cited | No |