The area of the United States known as its Heartland have different transportation systems that work together to create a successful transportation, industrial, and economic hub. The different transportation systems will be described in more detail, as well as how they all work together.
Within the heartland region of the United States and Canada, there seems to be several different forms of transportation available to transport goods or people from one place to another. Among these are highways, including freeway systems, air travel from most places, water transport through the major rivers and Great Lakes, as well as railroads.
Waterways:
The waterways of the Heartland Region were the original means of transportation throughout the region. This region includes some of North America’s largest and most navigable rivers, including the Mississippi River, the Ohio River, the Missouri River, as well as the St. Lawrence River up in the Canadian portion of the heartland. The earliest settlements in this region were along these larger, more navigable rivers – these include Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and St. Paul. While the land around these larger rivers was settled first, as the population increased, and settlement grew, it grew around the larger tributaries to these larger rivers, including Vincennes on the Wabash River, Peoria on the Illinois River, Des Moines on the Des Moines River, and so forth.
The waterways don’t just include the large navigable rivers in the region, but also include the Great Lakes as well as a host of canals that were eventually constructed, most of which are no longer in use. Along the Great Lakes several cities sprang up, along with the cities on the large rivers; these included Chicago and Milwaukee on Lake Michigan, Detroit on the river between Lakes Huron and Erie, Cleveland on Lake Erie, Buffalo on the falls between Lakes Erie and Ontario, and Rochester and Toronto on Lake Ontario. Of the few canals that are left and being used, they are usually ones that parallel the larger rivers and tributaries, especially through rougher portions of those rivers, particularly in places parallel to the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, although the Illinois Canal, parallel to the Illinois River throughout most of the state of Illinois, between St. Louis and Chicago still functions as a busy thoroughfare.
The larger rivers, the Great Lakes, as well as a few canals, are still being used today as transportation thoroughfares, especially for large shipments of coal, ore, or raw materials extracted from the ground. These shipments are usually moved through very large barges that are pulled by tugboats.
Railroads:
The second type of transportation to develop in the Heartland Region, after the waterways, was the railroads. This seemed to be a prime means of transportation, especially during the mid to late 19th century, before the development of the motor vehicle and highway systems to utilize them. Originally, they were built as a means to connect major waterways – people and goods would travel primarily through waterways, and use railroad systems to connect between waterways. Eventually, though, the railroad network became so dense that it eventually superseded the water routes. In fact, it was the dense railway network that helped to facilitate growth of the cities of the Heartland Region, as well as its industries.
Unfortunately, since the middle of the 20th century, railroad usage has declined significantly, since the road system has improved. There is still some cargo transported by rail, as well as passenger rail services in Canada and the U.S. (VIA and Amtrak), but the usage of railroads for these purposes is insignificant compared to roadways.
Roads:
After the invention and development of the mass production for the automobile, the motivation to take our unpaved roads, and pave them over, as well as to create state-wide and country-wide paved highways to facilitate travel through the use of motorized vehicles, took a general priority. The original paved roads throughout the Midwest included the Lincoln Highway (U.S.30) as well as the National Highway (U.S.50). Then, starting in the 1950’s, president Eisenhower commissioned the building of the Interstate Superhighway System, including in the Heartland Region, helping to create a system of fast travel through the use of personal motorized vehicles, that helped to connect the larger metropolitan areas of the Heartland Region. The province of Ontario, in Canada, has also built some freeways, such as the 401,402, and 403, connecting Windsor with Toronto, St. Catherine’s, Hamilton, Ottawa, and Montreal to the east.
These days, the paved roads for use by motorized vehicles, seems to be the most-used mode of transportation for the transport of both passengers and cargo. Personal vehicles tend to be everywhere, with at least one vehicle per person, and tractor-trailer combos tend to haul most cargo over the roads, being cheaper, in most cases, than hauling the cargo by train or by barge down a river, canal, or lake.
Airline Travel:
It seems that every larger metropolitan area has their own international airport, most midsized cities have regional airports, and almost every county in the region has at least a local airport. This means that it becomes easy for passengers to travel from one distant location to another. Airline travel seems to be the chief mode of transportation of passengers who wish to travel long distance, or globally, which does help with business connections and contacts, which, hopefully go to help the business sector of the Heartland Region. Unfortunately, large amounts of cargo and goods are not shipped via the air because of cost constraints, although some does, particularly smaller items that need rushed – services like FedEx, UPS, USPS Air Mail, and DHL are representative of the need for this form of shipping service.
How Transportation Sectors Work Together to Help the Heartland Region Form a Successful Business Hub:
Since the days of the prominence of railroads, the ability to be able to ship manufactured goods easily from the place of manufacture to the place where it is sold to customers, using efficient means of transport, has allowed the Heartland Region to be a successful business hub that has spurred on industrialization, allowing for this region, until recently, due to industrial and economic growth in the Inland South and the Southeastern Coast, as well as elsewhere, to be the economic engine that drives the rest of the economy of North America, although this part of Canada, lower Ontario, which is considered part of this region, still is considered Canada’s economic engine.
Add to this the fact that when the automobile showed up on the scene, as something that could be mass produced in a streamlined assembly line system of manufacture, with Detroit being the focus of this phenomena, it helped to increase the manufacturing sector of the region even more, as the main automobile assembly plants needed suppliers to provide the parts to be assembled in the automobiles, and the suppliers relied on tertiary sectors to help them stay in business. The railroad, and then the paved road that catered to motorized vehicle travel, helped to make this region an even more successful hub.
It seems that different modes of transportation, in the Heartland Region, are easier to construct than in other regions, such as Megalopolis, the Appalachian and Ozark Regions, the Atlantic Northeast, the Rocky Mountains and the Intermontane West because of its level, easy to manipulate ground, giving the Heartland Region a heads up on other regions, helping to spur on this region as a core economic and industrial hub for the continent. Add to that the fact that the closeness to population centers helped also to allow this region to become a successful hub.
There is also one more component about this region to recognize. Since this region is in the center of the North American continent, it is placed in a place where traffic, both passenger and cargo and goods, pass through on their way from one side of the continent to the other. This puts it in a place to profit from its central location. As you put all the pieces together, it seems rather obvious why this region has become a successful transportation hub.
