Improving Transnational Transport Corridors
In the OIC Member Countries: Concepts and Cases
7
As infrastructure is generally paid for by national states, there are economic and political
incentives to connect the capital with other cities in the country implying that the network is
dense in the heart of the country, but less dense closer to the borders to other countries. This is
strengthened by the fact that infrastructure is often built for passenger transport rather than
freight motivated by travel time savings and that passengers vote, while freight does not.
Multi-national corridor agreements are thus needed for international trade to work and joint
investments focus the bottle-necks between states rather than the main domestic routes.
In transport network theory, a corridor is only one way of connecting an origin (O) to a
destination (D). shows different ways of using links to connect an O with a D using
different nodes.
Figure 2: Six options for transport from an origin (O) to a destination (D) in a network
Source: Woxenius (2007).
The transport corridor is a design based on using a high-density flow along an artery and short
capillary services to nodes of the corridor. The nodes are thus hierarchically ordered. In this
example, O is a satellite node, and D is a corridor node. Corridors often origin in concentrations
of population and industry in linear belts with natural resources or fertile soil, or in the supply
of natural infrastructures like rivers. Nevertheless, also man-made canals, older roads and rail
trunk lines have over time fostered conurbations along the line (Priemus and Zonneveld,
2003) sometimes going back to antiquity, as described by Schönharting et al. (2003). The
traffic modes are often poorly integrated along corridors (Priemus and Zonneveld, 2003) but
Rodrigue (2004) identifies that the fragmentation stemming from intramodal competition is
being reduced and is now replaced by terms like co-modality and synchromodality (Woxenius
et al., 2017) emphasizing modal complementary along corridors aiming at efficient transfer of
goods.
Some geographically long and narrow countries such as Japan and Italy have developed
domestic infrastructure corridors (Woxenius, 1998) and large countries like China and the
USA have domestic corridor-based transport networks at par with multi-national transport
corridors in regions with smaller countries. An example in the USA is the Dwight D.
Corridor
O
D
Hub-and-spoke
O
D
Static routes
O
D
Direct link
O
D
Dynamic routes
1
2
O
D
1
2
2 1
Connected hubs
O
D