The new Infrastructure and Space - ICT and the four transport systems shape different accessibilty spaces

Résumé En

The aim of this paper is to show that current changes in international politics and economy as well as in communications infrastructure technology and organisation are laying the foundations of two new types of accessibility spaces. They are on one hand a transport linked nodal structure and on the other a non-nodal communication area. It is argued that ICT and the four systems of road, railtrack, air-corridor, and maritime passage and harbour constitute an integrated communications infrastructure in the sense that they are internally dependent by complementary and supplementary interrelations and to a degree are substitutable. This superstructure is constituted by five sets of different organisations and their networks. There are two spatial implications of transport network linear quality. One is that the coverage of transport services are not areal but linear and another is the varied nature of network competion. This variation is differentiated in time and by spatial scale. On the separate micro and the macro scales and during the initial phases of the transport network innovations they complement and supplement each other, at later stages they tend to compet with the advantage on the side of the most modem system. Regarding the micro and the macro scale together, they cooperate in order to produce the most efficient service combination. Thus the creation of transport service chains are coming into focus rather than single transport services. The ICT networks are areal (micro-wave carrier ) or semi-areal (dense local cable networks). When ICT services are used as complements to transport services they reinforce the transport linkages and have nodal implications. Only when ICT services are used for communication purposes do they have non-nodal repercussions. The political aim of all EU’s efforts to streamline the use of every single transport system by uniform regulations. Its economic goal is to expand growth and trade by forming a common transport policy and to support investments renewing all systems of communications. The speed and the capacity of some transport systems increases but in order to utilize these gains they have to be complemented by other transport systems.