IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jotrge/v123y2025ics0966692325000225.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Geospatial analysis of freight accessibility and job attraction: The role of interstate ramps, airports, ports, and rail

Author

Listed:
  • (Melrose) Pan, Meiyu
  • Dahal, Pankaj
  • Lim, Hyeonsup
  • Pandey, Birat

Abstract

The number of jobs within an industry is significantly influenced by geographical location, with transportation infrastructure playing a key role. While previous research has largely focused on how access to jobs affects employment, less attention has been given to how transportation infrastructure impacts business operations and job attraction. This study addresses this gap by examining how the ease of transporting products to key transportation facilities affects job numbers in freight-intensive industries. Using job data from the Longitudinal Employment Household Dynamics dataset at the Census Tract level, we applied a non-parametric model to assess the impact of proximity to interstate ramps, rail intermodals, ports, and airports. Our analysis revealed that closer transportation infrastructure generally has a greater impact on employment. Specifically, interstate ramps are crucial for attracting jobs, particularly in rural areas, while airport proximity is essential for industries dealing with high-value, time-sensitive goods, as seen notably in Massachusetts. The importance of transportation facilities varies considerably across states and industries. The findings and method in this study can be used by transportation agencies for freight planning.

Suggested Citation

  • (Melrose) Pan, Meiyu & Dahal, Pankaj & Lim, Hyeonsup & Pandey, Birat, 2025. "Geospatial analysis of freight accessibility and job attraction: The role of interstate ramps, airports, ports, and rail," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 123(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jotrge:v:123:y:2025:i:c:s0966692325000225
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2025.104131
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0966692325000225
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2025.104131?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kang, Sanggyun, 2020. "Warehouse location choice: A case study in Los Angeles, CA," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 88(C).
    2. Yena Song & Keumsook Lee & William Anderson & T. Lakshmanan, 2012. "Industrial agglomeration and transport accessibility in metropolitan Seoul," Journal of Geographical Systems, Springer, vol. 14(3), pages 299-318, July.
    3. Alex Karner & Rafael H. M. Pereira & Steven Farber, 2024. "Correction to: Advances and pitfalls in measuring transportation equityTransportation," Transportation, Springer, vol. 51(3), pages 1179-1179, June.
    4. Manout, Ouassim & Bonnel, Patrick & Bouzouina, Louafi, 2018. "Transit accessibility: A new definition of transit connectors," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 88-100.
    5. Michael de Bok & Frank van Oort, 2011. "Agglomeration economies, accessibility, and the spatial choice behavior of relocating firms," The Journal of Transport and Land Use, Center for Transportation Studies, University of Minnesota, vol. 4(1), pages 5-24.
    6. Miller, Keaton & Wilson, Wesley W., 2023. "Changes in rail rates for U.S. commodity grain shipments over time," Research in Transportation Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(C).
    7. van den Heuvel, Frank P. & Rivera, Liliana & van Donselaar, Karel H. & de Jong, Ad & Sheffi, Yossi & de Langen, Peter W. & Fransoo, Jan C., 2014. "Relationship between freight accessibility and logistics employment in US counties," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 91-105.
    8. Jang, Seongman & Lee, Seungil, 2020. "Study of the regional accessibility calculation by income class based on utility-based accessibility," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 84(C).
    9. Tilahun, Nebiyou & Fan, Yingling, 2014. "Transit and job accessibility: an empirical study of access to competitive clusters and regional growth strategies for enhancing transit accessibility," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 33(C), pages 17-25.
    10. Adelheid Holl & Ilaria Mariotti, 2018. "The Geography of Logistics Firm Location: The Role of Accessibility," Networks and Spatial Economics, Springer, vol. 18(2), pages 337-361, June.
    11. Guzman, Luis A. & Oviedo, Daniel & Rivera, Carlos, 2017. "Assessing equity in transport accessibility to work and study: The Bogotá region," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 236-246.
    12. Gutiérrez, Javier & Cardozo, Osvaldo Daniel & García-Palomares, Juan Carlos, 2011. "Transit ridership forecasting at station level: an approach based on distance-decay weighted regression," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 19(6), pages 1081-1092.
    13. John G. Fernald, 1999. "Roads to Prosperity? Assessing the Link between Public Capital and Productivity," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(3), pages 619-638, June.
    14. Martínez, L. Miguel & Viegas, José Manuel, 2013. "A new approach to modelling distance-decay functions for accessibility assessment in transport studies," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 26(C), pages 87-96.
    15. Karner, Alex, 2018. "Assessing public transit service equity using route-level accessibility measures and public data," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 24-32.
    16. Pan Wu & Jinlong Li & Yuzhuang Pian & Xiaochen Li & Zilin Huang & Lunhui Xu & Guilin Li & Ruonan Li, 2022. "How Determinants Affect Transfer Ridership between Metro and Bus Systems: A Multivariate Generalized Poisson Regression Analysis Method," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(15), pages 1-31, August.
    17. Zohreh Asadi-Shekari & Ismaïl Saadi & Mario Cools, 2022. "Applying Machine Learning to Explore Feelings about Sharing the Road with Autonomous Vehicles as a Bicyclist or as a Pedestrian," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(3), pages 1-10, February.
    18. Verma, Rajat & Ukkusuri, Satish V., 2025. "What determines travel time and distance decay in spatial interaction and accessibility?," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 122(C).
    19. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Addendum: Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(5), pages 768-768, November.
    20. Alkaabi, Khaula A. & Debbage, Keith G., 2011. "The geography of air freight: connections to U.S. metropolitan economies," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 19(6), pages 1517-1529.
    21. Hui Zou & Trevor Hastie, 2005. "Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 67(2), pages 301-320, April.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Yang, Zhiwei & Chen, Xiaohong & Pan, Ruixu & Yuan, Quan, 2022. "Exploring location factors of logistics facilities from a spatiotemporal perspective: A case study from Shanghai," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 100(C).
    2. Sun, Zhe & Zacharias, John, 2020. "Transport equity as relative accessibility in a megacity: Beijing," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 8-19.
    3. Champagne, Marie-Pier & Dubé, Jean, 2023. "The impact of transport infrastructure on firms’ location decision: A meta-analysis based on a systematic literature review," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 131(C), pages 139-155.
    4. Ben-Elia, Eran & Benenson, Itzhak, 2019. "A spatially-explicit method for analyzing the equity of transit commuters' accessibility," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 31-42.
    5. Samani, Ali Riahi & Mishra, Sabyasachee & Golias, Mihalis & Lee, David J.-H., 2023. "What influences the location choice of establishments? An analysis considering establishment types and activities interactions," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 111(C).
    6. Yu, Haitao & Jiao, Junfeng & Houston, Eric & Peng, Zhong-Ren, 2018. "Evaluating the relationship between rail transit and industrial agglomeration: An observation from the Dallas-fort worth region, TX," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 33-52.
    7. Tutz, Gerhard & Pößnecker, Wolfgang & Uhlmann, Lorenz, 2015. "Variable selection in general multinomial logit models," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 207-222.
    8. Carstensen, Kai & Heinrich, Markus & Reif, Magnus & Wolters, Maik H., 2020. "Predicting ordinary and severe recessions with a three-state Markov-switching dynamic factor model," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 829-850.
    9. Hou-Tai Chang & Ping-Huai Wang & Wei-Fang Chen & Chen-Ju Lin, 2022. "Risk Assessment of Early Lung Cancer with LDCT and Health Examinations," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(8), pages 1-12, April.
    10. Wang, Qiao & Zhou, Wei & Cheng, Yonggang & Ma, Gang & Chang, Xiaolin & Miao, Yu & Chen, E, 2018. "Regularized moving least-square method and regularized improved interpolating moving least-square method with nonsingular moment matrices," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 325(C), pages 120-145.
    11. Mkhadri, Abdallah & Ouhourane, Mohamed, 2013. "An extended variable inclusion and shrinkage algorithm for correlated variables," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 57(1), pages 631-644.
    12. Lucian Belascu & Alexandra Horobet & Georgiana Vrinceanu & Consuela Popescu, 2021. "Performance Dissimilarities in European Union Manufacturing: The Effect of Ownership and Technological Intensity," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(18), pages 1-19, September.
    13. Candelon, B. & Hurlin, C. & Tokpavi, S., 2012. "Sampling error and double shrinkage estimation of minimum variance portfolios," Journal of Empirical Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(4), pages 511-527.
    14. Andrea Carriero & Todd E. Clark & Massimiliano Marcellino, 2025. "Specification Choices in Quantile Regression for Empirical Macroeconomics," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 40(1), pages 57-73, January.
    15. Kim, Hyun Hak & Swanson, Norman R., 2018. "Mining big data using parsimonious factor, machine learning, variable selection and shrinkage methods," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 339-354.
    16. Shuichi Kawano, 2014. "Selection of tuning parameters in bridge regression models via Bayesian information criterion," Statistical Papers, Springer, vol. 55(4), pages 1207-1223, November.
    17. Chuliá, Helena & Garrón, Ignacio & Uribe, Jorge M., 2024. "Daily growth at risk: Financial or real drivers? The answer is not always the same," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 40(2), pages 762-776.
    18. Enrico Bergamini & Georg Zachmann, 2020. "Exploring EU’s Regional Potential in Low-Carbon Technologies," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(1), pages 1-28, December.
    19. Qianyun Li & Runmin Shi & Faming Liang, 2019. "Drug sensitivity prediction with high-dimensional mixture regression," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(2), pages 1-18, February.
    20. Jung, Yoon Mo & Whang, Joyce Jiyoung & Yun, Sangwoon, 2020. "Sparse probabilistic K-means," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 382(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jotrge:v:123:y:2025:i:c:s0966692325000225. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-transport-geography .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.