Modern business geography

Bibliographic data

Monograph

Identifikator:: 1830562916

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-217337

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Huntington, Ellsworth http://d-nb.info/gnd/117070092; Cushing, Sumner W.

Title:: Modern business geography

Place of publication:: New York [usw.]

Publisher:: World Book Company

Year of publication:: 1930

Scope:: VIII, 352 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

Usage license:: Get license information via the feedback formular.

Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Part two. The field of transportation

Collection:: Economics Books

Transportation and the Location of Cities 219 along every one of the numerous railways that center in the city. Except when the Great Lakes are icebound, steamships of at least eighteen different companies are speeding to the city with their bur- den of goods and passengers from the fertile and well populated hin- terland. At the same time, as many more trains and steamships are hurrying away from the city to distribute goods and passengers to the same great hinterland. The most productive part of the hinterland is included in a circle with a radius of 425 miles, centering at Chicago. Such a circle con- tains about half a million square miles of plains whose productiveness is scarcely excelled by that of any similar area in any part of the earth. It includes an area as large as Great Britain, France, and Germany combined. It also contains most of the Great Lakes, which offer the best facilities for inland navigation in any part of the world. Chicago illustrates the fact that where the convergence of land routes makes it necessary to have a harbor, man can build one even without help from nature. At the southern end of Lake Michigan there are no good harbors, and Chicago is located merely at the mouth of the little Chicago River. Improvements have constantly taken place, however, and when the present plans are completed the city will have an unsurpassed inland harbor. How transportation has helped the growth of Detroit. Although Detroit lies on a river, it is essentially a lake port. Among the lake ports of the world it comes next to Chicago in size. It is nominally the fourth city in the United States, although metropolitan Boston and Pittsburgh are both larger than metropolitan Detroit. Detroit, like Chicago, lies near the end of a great lake. There a railway route between New York and Chicago meets a water route connecting the iron mines and the coal mines. Although the rail- way route is shorter than the one on the south side of Lake Erie, it is less important. This is partly because a portion of it passes through foreign (i.e., Canadian) territory, and partly because it passes through [ew large cities. The iron-ore route helps Detroit relatively little be- cause most of the ore goes past Detroit in order to reach a port as near the coal mines as possible. Thus in this case, even more than in others, transportation is only one of the factors in the extraordinary growth of the city. The fact that the automobile industry centers here is in many ways much more important. The western end of Lake Erie and the southern end of Lake Huron form so important a center of communication that Toledo as well as Detroit has grown up here. It lies on the drowned mouth of the

Access restriction

Copyright

fullscreen: Modern business geography

Monograph

Chapter

Table of contents

Download

Monograph

Chapter

This page

Image fragment

Citation links

Citation recommendation