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Transport geography has always been pulled between two ambitions: to model the efficient movement of people and goods across space, and to understand what mobility means for the people who move. This tension between the science of flows and the study of lived experience has driven the subfield's theoretical evolution for more than half a century. Each major framework emerged as a response to what its proponents saw as the limitations of earlier approaches, and many of these frameworks remain in active use today, creating a pluralistic landscape where quantitative models, critical theories, and embodied analyses coexist and compete.
Transport geography first took shape within the broader spatial science movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Spatial Science treated transport as a system of flows that could be described by mathematical models—gravity models, network analysis, and location theory. Its practitioners sought universal laws of movement, such as the inverse relationship between distance and interaction. This framework provided the subfield with its first rigorous toolkit and remains the methodological infrastructure for transport planning and policy. However, its focus on aggregate patterns and rational actors left little room for human subjectivity, social inequality, or the meanings people attach to travel. By the 1970s, critics began to argue that the models were elegant but empty, and new frameworks emerged to address what Spatial Science had ignored.
Two parallel critiques of Spatial Science appeared in the 1970s, each narrowing the focus in a different direction. Behavioral Geography shifted attention from aggregate flows to individual decision-making. Drawing on cognitive psychology, it asked how people perceive space, acquire information, and make travel choices. This framework preserved the positivist commitment to measurement and prediction but replaced aggregate models with disaggregate, individual-level analysis. At the same time, Time Geography, developed by Torsten Hägerstrand and his colleagues, took a different tack. Instead of focusing on cognition, it emphasized the structural constraints that shape movement: the fixed locations of home, work, and school; the limited time available; and the need to coordinate activities with others. Time Geography introduced the concept of the space-time path and the constraints of capability, coupling, and authority. Where Behavioral Geography saw individual preferences, Time Geography saw structural limits. Both frameworks coexisted with Spatial Science rather than replacing it, and both remain influential in transport modeling and activity-based analysis.
By the 1980s, transport geography began to engage with the critical theories reshaping human geography more broadly. Marxist Geography brought class and political economy to the forefront. It argued that transport systems are not neutral infrastructures but are shaped by capitalist relations—the need to move labor to factories, goods to markets, and to manage the spatial fix of capital. This framework revealed how transport investments and disinvestments produce uneven development and reinforce class inequalities. However, Marxist Geography's focus on class alone proved too narrow. Feminist Geography, emerging at the same time and continuing to the present, broadened the critique to include gender. It showed that transport systems are designed around male commuting patterns, that women's travel is more complex due to caregiving responsibilities, and that safety and accessibility are deeply gendered. Feminist Geography also introduced intersectionality, examining how gender interacts with race, class, and other axes of inequality. While Marxist Geography's influence narrowed after the 1990s, Feminist Geography has persisted and expanded, becoming one of the leading critical frameworks in the subfield today. Both frameworks transformed transport geography by insisting that mobility is political.
Running parallel to the critical turn, Humanistic Geography offered a different kind of reaction against Spatial Science. Instead of focusing on power and inequality, it emphasized the subjective, emotional, and existential dimensions of travel. Drawing on phenomenology and existentialism, Humanistic Geography asked what it feels like to move through space—the sense of freedom on an open road, the anxiety of navigating an unfamiliar city, the attachment to familiar routes. This framework rejected the reduction of travel to a derived demand and insisted that movement is meaningful in itself. Humanistic Geography did not develop a large empirical program within transport geography, but its concerns were later absorbed and transformed by the Mobilities Paradigm and Non-Representational Theory, which gave them new theoretical and methodological tools.
The most transformative recent shift in transport geography came with the Mobilities Paradigm, which emerged around 2000. This framework reconceptualized movement not as a mere transfer between fixed points but as a constitutive social force. Drawing on sociology, anthropology, and cultural geography, the Mobilities Paradigm argued that mobilities—of people, goods, information, and ideas—shape identities, power relations, and social life. It absorbed concerns from Humanistic Geography (the experience of travel), Feminist Geography (the politics of mobility), and Time Geography (the constraints on movement), while adding new attention to immobilities, speed, and the materialities of transport infrastructure. The Mobilities Paradigm has become a leading framework in transport geography, transforming how researchers study everything from commuting to tourism to migration.
Within this broader paradigm, Non-Representational Theory operates as a specialized strand. Emerging at the same time, it focuses on the embodied, affective, and pre-cognitive dimensions of movement. Where the Mobilities Paradigm often analyzes mobility as a social and cultural phenomenon, Non-Representational Theory drills down into the micro-practices of moving—the rhythm of walking, the sensation of cycling, the habitual gestures of driving. It complements the Mobilities Paradigm by providing a fine-grained account of how mobility is actually performed, but it remains a more niche approach, valued for its attention to the non-verbal and the visceral.
Today, transport geography is a field of living disagreement and productive coexistence. The leading frameworks are the Mobilities Paradigm, Feminist Geography, and the quantitative legacy of Spatial Science. They agree that mobility is socially produced, that it has power dimensions, and that it matters for people's lives. But they disagree on what the primary goal of transport geography should be. The quantitative tradition, still essential for planning and policy, aims to explain and predict movement patterns. The Mobilities Paradigm seeks to understand mobility as a cultural and social force. Feminist Geography insists on exposing and challenging inequalities. Non-Representational Theory adds a focus on embodied experience. These frameworks often intersect in mixed-methods research: a study of cycling might use GIS to map routes (Spatial Science), interviews to explore gendered safety concerns (Feminist Geography), and video ethnography to capture the embodied practice of riding (Non-Representational Theory). The Journal of Transport Geography and the Handbook of Transport Geography and Spatial Systems are key venues where these approaches meet and debate. The central tension between quantitative modeling and critical, experiential analysis remains unresolved, and that tension is precisely what keeps the subfield vital. As new challenges emerge—autonomous vehicles, digital mobility platforms, climate change—transport geography's diverse frameworks provide the tools to ask both how these systems work and what they mean for the people who move through them.