Transportation started to span the entire world in 1920, and since then, it has posed a lot of challenges in the world. Whereas the transportation sector has assisted most individuals and companies in giving them mobility and also means of transporting goods and services, it has exhibited impacts on the environments that we intend to discuss here. These activate are carried out in rural areas, urban areas, and also internationally. This has caused both the national government and international government to regulate these activities, and the most important thing or issue here is environmental impact, and that’s what the stakeholders involved are interested in. Since it is composed of three modes of transport, we are going to look at each of the impacts that each of these modes has posed on the environment.
The impacts in question can be categorized into direct impacts, indirect impacts, and cumulative impacts. The instant results of transportation activities that are imposed on the environment and the relationship between the cause and effect have no ambiguity called direct impacts and, in this case, on the environment. On the other hand, indirect impacts are also called secondary or tertiary impacts, and their consequences are much higher than those of direct impacts. The last type of impact is the cumulative impact which is hard to predict and also considers the effects of both indirect and direct collisions on the environment. It is important to highlight that this document will only discuss the first two types of transportation impacts on the environment.
Land transport, which includes road, train, and pipeline, has resulted in the following impacts. One is water pollution. This has been caused by the fact that the pipelines while transmitting liquid and gaseous goods such as crude oil leak in the process of being transported from their source to their destination. This, in turn, may be carried by erosion to the sources of water like lakes and also rivers causing pollution to that water. When such a resource gets polluted, the population, therefore, gets affected since they consume the same water that is already polluted. This causes diseases that expose human beings and also other living things to great risk of spending more on medication. The other impact under this category is air pollution due to the combustion of gases such as hydrocarbons. This is due to the internal engines that use products of crude oil such as petrol and diesel. When they burn in the engine, the result is that waste is produced that combine with the air that living things inhale and plants use.
The consequence of this is an unhealthy population and other living things in general. Biodiversity is also another impact in that transportation manipulates vegetation that has grown naturally. This is as a result of cutting down trees and other vegetation so that roads and railways can be constructed. It, therefore, means that most of the animals have died, and others are migrating from their original habitat because the vegetation has been cleared to make land available for constructing roads, railways, and installing pipelines. Construction of ports along the coastal regions has resulted in what is referred to as land take. This is also the case when one considers the development of airports which takes a lot of land to develop its infrastructure. Soil quality cannot be understated when it comes to transportation since the removal of soil from its original place when constructing infrastructure and also modification of the actions of waves along the riverbanks by the shipping activities affects soil quality.