2.Give the summary of the text Transportation Modes

Ships and Barges. The oldest American transportation mode^ was shipping. Before roads existed, coastal communities and interior settlements, located on navigable rivers, communicated and traded by ship. Contact with Europe, of course, was only possible by ocean-going transportation. Much later, the great river systems and canal systems, such as New York's Erie Canal, played an important role in settling the interior of the nation and moving its agricultural products to market.

Today, inland waterways—including navigable rivers, canals, lakes, and intracoastal routes—total about 25,000 miles within the territorial United States. Inland water transportation is very slow and affected by weather and seasonal conditions, so for most shippers, it is out of the question. Many shippers either do not have access to navigable waterways or their points of destination are not on navigable water. For certain types of shippers, however, water remains attrac­tive. Shippers of bulk commodities such as oil, petrochemicals, wheat, and coal find the extremely low rates of barge and ship transportation attractive, even if it means transferring these commodities at some point to other modes. As a result, inland waterway transportation steadily holds on to a substantial 15 per­cent of the domestic intercity^ freight tonnage.

Trucks Virtually any spot in the United States is accessible by truck. There are over 3.8 million miles of roads and streets in the United States. The intercity highway network alone totals 680,000 miles, about 40,000 miles of this being the federal interstate highway system (entirely built since 1956). More than 32 million privately and publicly owned trucks operate over this massive road net­work.

Trucks are the dominant freight carrier in the United States. Although rail­roads carry a greater total tonnage of goods, trucks earn about 80 percent of the American freight revenue bill by carrying about 25 percent of the goods. Actually these figures understate the importance of trucks. They do not include the freight operations of firms such as grocery chains^ that operate their own fleets of trucks.

Railroads At the close of the nineteenth century, railroads were American transportation. One out of every seven working Americans worked for the rail­road and the nation was crisscrossed by more than 250,000 miles of railroad routes; many of these were double and triple tracked. By 1983, the network had shrunk^ to about 180,000 miles of routes and large sections of the nation had lost rail service altogether. Railroads earn only about 12 percent of the total freight bill but they carry 35% of the freight. Nevertheless, as a bulk long-distance carrier, the railroad is still important. At the peak of operations, American rail­roads had the capacity (in terms of tonnage) to load the household goods of every American plus half the population's automobiles.

Planes. Most of us associate airplanes with passenger service rather than freight movement. Regularly scheduled air flights and nonscheduled carriers move less than 1 percent of (IS freight—mostly mail and express delivery pack­ages. Nevertheless, the specialized services account for more than 1 percent of the total freight revenue of the American transportation system.

Recently, air transportation has been in the public eye as a result of the "overnight parcel" war between Airborne, Federal Express, Purolator, and Emery freight companies (along with the U.S. Postal Service). At approximately $10 for 3 pounds of parcel, such service will have little or no appeal to the shipper of ordinary merchandise. Diamond dealers, some financial institutions, harried authors, and businesses trying to overcome communication problems may find the service worthwhile, but it is not the way of the future for the physical distribution of goods. Even regular air freight service is becoming less attractive to many shippers as rising fuel prices forced a 33 percent increase in air freight rates between 1977 and 1982.

A Note on Mixed Modes. The actual movement of a commodity may involve more than one transportation mode. With the coming of containerization, mixed modal movement has become quite common. Efforts have been made to take advantage of the economies offered by the different modes as well as meet the physical requirements of moving the good. (After all, not all plant and warehouse locations have access to all transportation modes.)

Commodities may move through a variety of distributional channels as they reach consumers—direct sales to the consumer, from producer to retailer to consumer, and from producer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer. As middlemen, wholesalers and retailers play an important part in the placement mix available to an enterprise marketing a product. Although wholesalers do add to the final cost of the product, they provide useful services to both the manufacturer and the retailer. As the last step in the channel of distribution of goods to customers, retailers are obviously closest to the customer. Retail efforts are in a perpetual state of change and adaption as new retailing techniques are developed and old ones redeveloped in efforts to sell commodities. The principal retail outlets have been: general stores, single line stores, department stores, mail-order houses, variety stores, food stores (cash and carry and supermarkets), discount houses, and convenience stores. Although some of these retail efforts have disappeared, others have recently found new life. Looking toward the future, some marketers predict that retailing will actually enter the consumer's home via video-computer connections.

As goods move through the channels of distribution they must undergo the phys­ical distribution activities of storage and transportation. In making transportation deci­sions, shippers may choose between private, contract, or common carriers to move their goods. Five principal transportation modes are available: ships, railroads, trucks, pipe­lines, and airplanes. Each mode, however, offers special cost and service advantages and disadvantages which must be carefully considered in shippers' decisions.