Tourism and Transport in the New Millennium; Sustainable Development and Sustainability Issues

The significance of transport as an integral component of the tourism system has been thesubject of discussion in the tourism literature since the 1970s. Not only is transport anecessary condition for tourism to exist; it often forms a key part of the tourist experience atthe destination.Current high levels of tourism in the world are attributable in large part to thetransport systems developed over the past several decades. Transport has the potential to actas a gatekeeper to culture contact, constraining or encouraging host-tourist interaction andexplicitly exacerbating inequity. In terms of ―sustainability‖, transport exerts substantialexternality effects, as witnessed by growing alarm over the growth and impact of internationalair travel at a global level. But while there has long been concern over the local impacts oftourism development processes, the role of tourist mobility at a local level has tended not tobe placed in a prominent position in debates on externality effects.This paper seeks to explore issues of sustainability relating to tourism transport and raisesseveral analytical questions concerning the actual and symbolic representations of leisure andtourism mobility and the sustainability implications of theexternalities arising from suchmobility. Such issues have significance for members of host communities, transport and landuseplanning in host areas, tourists and the tourism industry. Although issues of sustainabilityhave been in the forefront of academic, and to some extent public, discussion, in both thetransport and tourism policy arenas, little synergy or complementarity has been achievedbetween the transport and tourism debates on the impacts of transport externality costs borneby host populations and environments in tourism destination areas. We begin with adiscussion of the nature of current transport systems and what it is that makes these nonsustainable.This is followed by an examination of the way in which transport and tourisminteract and the description of the sustainable mobility.

کلیدواژه ها:

Tourism ، Transport ، Sustainability ، Sustainable Issues ، Development