ABSTRACT
There have been two kinds of change in human mobility since hominids began exploring the African savannah: incremental change and revolutionary change. For much of history, people made incremental improvements to their inherited technology and practices for moving about. Tinkering with wheels, sails and engines produced real transport advances, but these gradual changes do not provide understanding of what makes a transport revolution occur and where it can lead. This chapter focuses on revolutionary changes: the more dramatic instances of rapid shifts from prevailing to new mobility patterns. These sudden changes were disruptive. They broke patterns of how people relied on technology for enabling mobility and they quickly changed expectations of what the norm in trade and travel was. These revolutions thus show how transport alternatives can reshape society.
