ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with global trends and how they influence the development of the transport sector, focusing on the main features which characterize the most recent developments of transport networks. It also deals with the empirical study, which is based on the Italian railway network. The chapter identifies the spatial effects of changes in accessibility on the territorial organization by considering, travel times under the complete network, then the times on the assumption that the regional and local services are excluded. It presents an application of geographical information systems in network analysis as a tool to fill the gap between model building and empirical analysis particularly through some maps which represent the results. Communication takes place by improving the level of cohesion in the network by a process of interconnection among different networks. The problem which often arises is in the visualization of the data on different scales and the resolution of the representation.
