Improving Transnational Transport Corridors
In the OIC Member Countries: Concepts and Cases
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Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, also referred to as the
Interstate Highway System. Examples of particular mega-corridors are found along the
Japanese east coast (Perl and Goetz, 2015), the BostWash corridor in the USA (Rodrigue,
2004), the Rhein-Ruhr-Randstadt/Flemish diamond corridor in Western Europe
(Schönharting et al., 2003) and the West Midlands to London corridor in the UK, which
Chapman et al. (2003) denotes a complex area of ‘braided’ infrastructure. Economic
development along the corridor often resulted in substantial urbanization and congestion,
which has led to some reluctance to actively develop corridors (de Vries and Priemus, 2003)
and sometimes even unwillingness by spatial planners (Priemus and Zonneveld, 2003).
A typical application of the corridor design in a national setting is the intercity passenger
trains with stops along the line. For geographical reasons, freight traffic with barges on inland
waterways, as investigated by Al Enezy et al. (2017), utilizes the corridor design, while the US
structure with Class I railroads, cooperating with feeder short lines, represents a rail freight
application.
Multinational corridors are sometimes intended to move freight from end-points, but there is
often enough demand for direct links and often also for using alternative routes or modes. One
example is that land transport corridors connecting East Asia with Europe, where shipping and
partly air will dominate for many years. More importantly, the corridors can develop the
intermediate areas by improved connectivity, access to large markets via the corridor or by
deep sea shipping access for land-locked countries. Hence, a corridor differs from a culvert or
tunnel by the presence of “doors” that leads to new opportunities shows how freight
can follow the corridor for different distances.
Figure 3: Example of a corridor with intermediate terminals and some alternative transport
arrangements
Source: Woxenius (1998)
The corridor concept is also used for development of transport systems with less focus on a
linear geography. One example is the EU project Swiftly Green with a Corridor Development
Plan (CLOSER, 2015) that brings up different initiatives along a corridor between Sweden and
Italy including very local initiatives in terminals along the corridor, but also in a rather wide
region around the corridor.
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