If one examines the social and economic impact of road transportation in any given nation, it will not be an over statement to say it’s a notable factor for national development. This is so because of its flexibility that leads to enormous contributions to the rapid, social and economic development in our rural communities and urban areas.
However, using land transportation to increase trade flow across borders of neighbor countries has a lot of benefits for such countries. Why? I guess you may want to ask. Firstly, trade, as it were, has great potential to create wealth, to reduce poverty and to sustain economic growth, while land transportation, on the other hand plays a key role in production and distribution of goods and services as well as creating employment for many people. This means road transportation, as it were, plays both direct and indirect roles to reduce poverty and to sustain economic growth.
So, due to the enormous contributions of road transportation to national development of any nation in the world. Hence, the need for international road transportation between neighboring countries to boost international trade on domestically produced products of good quality becomes inevitable.
Governments of these neighboring countries have realized the important need to take the advantage of their proximity to complement each other with their peculiar products so as to boost their economies. The issue of economic growth must be a matter of concern to any serious government. Having realized this fact hence, the comparative means of transportation to achieve this goal is international road transportation.
So, What Is International Road Transportation?
International road transport refers to land transportation between two or more neighboring countries. It can also be seen as trans-border road transportation. In other words, it is the movement of people and goods among countries that share common borders through roads agreed by the neighboring countries for their international transportation. Better still, it is the movement of goods and people by road transport across national boundaries of neighboring countries.
Why is it the Most Preferable Mode among Neighboring Countries?
There are reasons why land transportation is judged as the best mode for international transportation among other modes, here are the reasons:
For instance, Sea transport is cheaper but very slow when you compare it to road transport. Also, air transport is very fast but much costlier than road transport likewise; rail is also cheaper than road transport but not as flexible as road transport that has the quality to offer door-to-door services. Therefore, the road transport only has a comparative advantage over other modes although, it’s not cheaper than both sea and rail transport and it’s not as air transport.
In addition, time sensitivity is another notable advantage of road transport over other modes of transportation. Even though it is not as fast as air transport yet because of its flexibility it’s comparatively faster than other transport modes. For instance, sea and air transport operations end in their ports while rail transport also ends in railway station. It also delays the movement of goods to the last destination and none of these other modes has the quality to provide door-to-door transport services like road transport.
Another uniqueness of road transport is that, it is the only transport mode that can complement other modes.
Example of Countries that Share Common Road across-border
There are countries with bilateral agreement to share common road that links two or more countries together, here are few examples:
- China and Mongolia
- Mongolia and Russian Federation
- Mongolia and Republic of Katakhstan
Source: Ministry of Road and Transport Mongolia
- China and Kazakhstan
- China and Uzbekistan
- China and Kyrgyzstan
- China and Tajikistan
- China and Russia
- China; Pakistan; Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan
- China, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan
Source: The introduction of international Road Transport Agreements of China: Ministry of Transport of China, Mar. 25, 2015.
Many nations which are neighbors to one another have realized the need to complement each other well with their peculiar products and also to enhance economic cooperation among themselves. These amongst other reasons, justify the need for cheap, fast and timely or ‘just in time’ transport services to move their quality domestic products across borders. Therefore, the best possible means to achieve this is through international road transport.
It is interesting to note that no government of any nation in the world has sufficiently developed to offer employment to all its unemployed citizens. This explains why we have an unusually high number of unemployed youths in different parts of the world especially in developing countries.
So, the issue of unemployment is a universal problem. To this end, international road transportation is an essential panacea to unemployment because it will definitely aid production and international trade thereby, providing both direct and indirect job opportunities to many citizens.
Thank you for reading.
Image credited to: Pixabay
