REGIONAL ECONOMIC COMPETITION AND CONTAINERIZED FREIGHT SHIPPING: A STUDY OF REGIONAL ACCESSIBILITY IN THE UNITED STATES AND LESSONS FOR CHINA
SPEAKER:
PROFESSOR JEAN-CLAUDE THILL
Knight Distinguished Professor of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
DATE:
29 MAY 2009 (FRIDAY)
TIME:
19:00 - 20:00
VENUE:
WANG GUNGWU THEATRE, GRADUATE HOUSE, THE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
ORGANIZED BY:
Institute of Transport Studies, The University of Hong Kong
ABSTRACT:
Intermodalism has become one of the most significant transformations of freight transportation in the United States and across the world over the past three decades. The coupling of shipping modes has enabled shippers to more fully realize the respective time and costs advantages of respective modes. This lecture aims at finding how the intermodal freight transportation network affects the ability of regions to position themselves more effectively in the national space-economy. In particular, the opportunity to take advantage of intermodalism when shipping manufactured goods overseas may provide an essential competitive edge to a company or to an entire region engaged in world commerce. The case of domestic and international containerized freight traffic is examined because it is closely associated with contemporary forms of integration between rail shipping and trucking. The change in the freight accessibility map of the United States to domestic and foreign markets that can be ascribed to intermodal infrastructures and operations is investigated. With the help of geospatial techniques of geographic information systems, the potential impact of intermodalism in the United States is analyzed by mapping integral place accessibility measures of zip code areas. The performance of the intermodal freight network is evaluated by comparing accessibility measures based on the highway network and on the intermodal network, respectively. In studying export-led shipping activities, we particularly examine access to container terminals in North American seaports segmented by major seaboards. Implications for the U.S. space-economy are discussed and lessons for China are drawn.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Professor Jean-Claude Thill is the Knight Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He holds a doctorate in Geography from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. Dr. Thill's multi-prong research has centered on the spatial dimension of mobility systems and their consequences on how space is used and organized in modern societies, statistical and computational methods of spatial analysis, and most recently urban land-use dynamics. Since 2008, he has been Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, and serves on the editorial boards of several other regional, national, and international journals of geography, regional science, and spatial systems. He is the Executive Director of the North American Regional Science Council. He received the 2008 David Boyce Award from the North American Regional Science Council. He has held faculty positions at Florida Atlantic University, The University of Georgia, and The State University of New York at Buffalo. He joined the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2006.