Transport hub

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, the busiest transportation hub in the Western Hemisphere
Underground bus and coach terminal and metro station are located underneath the Kamppi Center in Helsinki, Finland
"Solidarity" Szczecin–Goleniów Airport, Poland
DHL hub Leipzig/Halle Airport, Germany

A transport hub is a place where

seaports and truck terminals, or combinations of these. For private transport by car, the parking lot
functions as a unimodal hub.

History

Historically, an interchange service in the scheduled passenger air transport industry involved a "through plane" flight operated by two or more airlines where a single aircraft was used with the individual airlines operating it with their own flight crews on their respective portions of a direct, no-change-of-plane multi-stop flight. In the U.S., a number of air carriers including

TWA), United Airlines and Western Airlines previously operated such cooperative "through plane" interchange flights on both domestic and/or international services with these schedules appearing in their respective system timetables.[1][2]

FedEx adopted the hub and spoke model for overnight package delivery during the 1970s. When the United States airline industry was deregulated
in 1978, Delta's hub and spoke paradigm was adopted by several airlines. Many airlines around the world operate hub-and-spoke systems facilitating passenger connections between their respective flights.

Public transport

Finch Station
connects underground train, local, regional, and interregional bus services.

, while a major transport hub, often multimodal (bus and rail), may be referred to as a transport centre or, in American English, as a transit center.[4] Sections of city streets that are devoted to functioning as transit hubs are referred to as transit malls. In cities with a central station, that station often also functions as a transport hub in addition to being a railway station.

Journey planning involving transport hubs is more complicated than direct trips, as journeys will typically require a transfer at the hub. Modern electronic journey planners for public transport have a digital representation of both the stops and transport hubs in a network, to allow them to calculate journeys that include transfers at hubs.

Airports

Airports have a twofold hub function. First they concentrate passenger traffic into one place for onward transportation. This makes it important for airports to be connected to the surrounding transport infrastructure, including roads, bus services, and railway and rapid transit systems. Secondly some airports function as intra-modular hubs for the airlines, or airline hubs. This is a common strategy among network airlines who fly only from limited number of airports and usually will make their customers change planes at one of their hubs if they want to get between two cities the airline does not fly directly between.

Airlines have extended the hub-and-spoke model in various ways. One method is to create additional hubs on a regional basis, and to create major routes between the hubs. This reduces the need to travel long distances between nodes that are close together. Another method is to use

focus cities
to implement point-to-point service for high traffic routes, bypassing the hub entirely.

Freight

There are usually three kinds of freight hubs: sea-road, sea-rail and road-rail, though they can also be sea-road-rail. With the growth of containerization, intermodal freight transport has become more efficient, often making multiple legs cheaper than through services—increasing the use of hubs.[citation needed]

See also

References

  1. ^ http://www.timetableimages.com Archived 2017-09-12 at the Wayback Machine, April 24, 1966 & July 1, 1986 Braniff International Airways system timetables; Jan. 15, 1956 Continental Airlines system timetable; Sept. 30, 1966 Delta Air Lines system timetable; June 1, 1980 Alaska Airlines system timetable; April 24, 1966 United Airlines system timetable; March 2, 1962 National Airlines system timetable; June 1, 1969 Pan Am system timetable
  2. ^ http://www.departedflights.com Archived 2016-10-20 at the Wayback Machine, March 1, 1981 Western Airlines route map
  3. ^ Delta Air Lines. "Delta through decades". Archived from the original on 2005-11-24.
  4. ^ "A transit center is a major transit hub served by several bus or rail lines." Tri-Met: Transit Centers Archived 2010-06-12 at the Wayback Machine