Jean-Paul Rodrigue

The container made intercontinental transport so cheap it became almost irrelevant to a product's final price. Rodrigue studies where that cost went: to the final leg, inside the city. A van delivering twenty parcels in a congested district, double-parked, with no loading bay and half the recipients out, consumes a disproportionate share of the logistics budget and of road space.

His framework treats supply chains geographically: ports, inland terminals, distribution centres and the last mile form one system, and changing one piece moves all the others. Hence his analysis of e-commerce, which has not simply added traffic but replaced one shopping trip by the customer with several delivery trips, and moved the warehouse from the industrial estate to the street.

A professor at Hofstra University in New York, Rodrigue is lead author of The Geography of Transport Systems, the field's standard textbook, whose online edition is freely available and used in universities worldwide. He has advised ports and international bodies on port planning and intermodality.

His work on «port regionalisation» describes how major ports have extended inland through dry terminals connected by rail, a process that reorganises the industrial geography of entire regions. For planning, his lesson is that logistics occupies land, generates traffic and defines neighbourhoods, and almost never appears in the master plan.