Public Transport Logistics (PTL): The Air Transport Sub-System

This article discusses the social forces driving new challenges for public transport users, businesses and society at large. Transport infrastructure of the past tended to be highly centralized and the cost of transport was high and substitutions limited. This was so because the time gap between the railway and the horse carriage remained high. With increased flexibility of the individual (cars) a lesser dependency on public ground transport evolved. However, the centralized transport mode that has held out the longest is air transport due to the costs of associated private ownership and long distances traveled. Consequently air transport is the only public transport mode still enjoying fast growth. However, social factors are increasingly limiting the growth potential of air transport and especially the airport infrastructures within large urban systems. Transport per se is at the heart of this manufactured risk as the largest pollutant, uppermost in our minds when it comes to safety (grouped with nuclear power plants) and the key target of violent attacks. Transport is thus important in how modernization has developed and the current transition towards reflexive modernisation characterized by sustainability and preventive measures. This very societal change in conjunction with fast growth of private transport and air transport is forcing us to question the setup and management of the transport system, with perhaps the greatest imminent pressure on the air transport subsystem. Due to long planning cycles, decisions made today for transport infrastructure and technology can have impact decades from now. Thus, the article observes that policy-making in transport involves increased perceived risk for policy makers and industry. Addressing these changes is not to slow down but to do more with less: haul more people, more comfortably, more safely, with less energy and less land use. The article draws lessons from the evolution of freight logistics and supply-chain management and use air transport (airports) as a sub-system embedded in the transport system at large to demonstrate how “public transport logistics” as a field could address some of the challenges ahead.