ANALYSIS OF AIR FREIGHT TRANSPORTATION ASSOCIATED WITH HIGH TECHNOLOGY MANUFACTURING DEVELOPMENT

Transportation has been largely overlooked as a support infrastructure to high technology economic development. Some recent state and local initiatives and technical articles show an increased awareness of transportation's role in high technology economic development in such areas as air passenger service and air freight, proximity to freeways, and access to campuslike industrial sites and suburban housing. To date, transportation planning for high technology has been hampered by lack of specificity (e.g., what are the high technology air freight sensitive industries?). The utility of conventional definitions of high technology manufacturing is examined. With the aid of the Commodity Transportation Survey of the Census of Transportation, 1977, a list of high technology, high air freight commodities is obtained. These commodity types, at the five-digit level, prove to be useful for the study of geographic variability in air freight utilization between production areas in the United States. The list is shown to be sufficiently discriminatory to provide a starting point for local planning of air freight demand by high technology manufacturing.