Short answers, pulled from the story.
Transport is the intentional movement of humans, animals, and goods from one location to another. Its modes include air, land split into rail and road, water, cable, pipelines, and space. The field divides into infrastructure, vehicles, and operations.
The rocket is the fastest method of transport and the aircraft is second. Commercial jets reach up to 955 km/h and single-engine aircraft 555 km/h, while modern high-speed rail reaches up to 350 km/h and commercial maglev in Shanghai runs at 460 km/h.
Water transport is a highly efficient method of moving large quantities of goods even though it is slow. Nearly 35,000 commercial vessels carried 7.4 billion tons of cargo in 2007, and water shipping costs significantly less than air transport for transcontinental routes.
According to the International Energy Agency, the transportation sector accounts for more than one-third of CO2 emissions globally in the early 2020s, with road transport the largest contributor to global warming. In 2022 sector emissions grew by more than 250 Mt CO2 to nearly 8 Gt CO2.
Containerization standardized ISO containers across all vehicles and ports, replacing the manual loading and unloading of cargo into a ship or car hull. It enabled automated handling, transfers between modes, and economies of scale, becoming a key driving factor in international trade and globalization since the 1950s.
As of 2015 there were 950 million passenger cars worldwide, with a projected total of 2.5 billion in 2050. The automobile is the most common road vehicle in the U.S. and the main source of harmful noise and air pollution in cities.
The Industrial Revolution in the 19th century changed transport through the steam engine and its use in rail, making land transport independent of human or animal muscle. The Wright brothers demonstrated the first successful controllable airplane in 1903, and containerization spread in the 1950s.