Whether stuck in slow-moving traffic, coping with a flight delay, or sitting motionless in a metro car because of an unexpected obstruction on the tracks, it can be easy to feel frustrated that transportation is still fraught with such annoyances. But stepping back to consider the broader story of transportation progress reveals just how utterly our world has changed.
In the modern world, we are accustomed to sending messages instantly across the globe, video chatting with people in different time zones, receiving deliveries with overnight or even same-day shipping, and even exploring other countries if we so desire, with the annual number of tourists on international flights reaching new highs. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center survey, 76 percent of people in the United States have visited at least one other country, and in many countries the equivalent figure is even higher. In the United Kingdom, it’s 94 percent. In 2025, over half of Americans maintained a valid passport for foreign travel, representing an all-time high, up from less than 5 percent as recently as 1990. In the United Kingdom, over 90 percent hold a passport. Today, the average person can afford to visit far-flung destinations once accessible only to the wealthiest travelers, even aided by cost-saving AI travel-advisors.
A modern passenger plane could circumnavigate Earth, traversing a distance of about 24,900 miles, in about 42 hours. The rich and famous can even purchase brief joyrides to outer space as tourists, and as much as some like to mock the trend, the fact that private companies have made commercial spaceflight accessible to people without professional astronaut training is an extraordinary achievement. Human flight, let alone spaceflight, was once confined to the realm of imagination and myth, such as the cautionary tale of Icarus who died for daring to fly too close to the sun. Over 100,000 flights now regularly take off and land each day.
Such feats would seem miraculous to our ancestors. For them, people, goods, and information all moved at a slow pace, once limited to the speed of animals on land or, at best, wind-powered ships at sea, which in medieval Europe typically covered only 60–90 miles per day—even less when rowed.
Our forebears were more isolated than a modern person can easily imagine, owing in part to the fact that transportation was once painfully sluggish, cumbersome, and dangerous, and posed a host of other problems for travelers. Preindustrial travel was slow, unreliable, arduous, and expensive. And for centuries, progress was practically imperceptible. The French poet and essayist Paul Valéry noted that, despite their being separated by over a thousand years of history, “Napoleon moved no faster than Julius Caesar.”
In the preindustrial age, most people lived their whole lives within their immediate community. Economic exchange tended to be far more local than today. In Britain, for example, day-to-day commerce in 1700 resembled commerce in the Middle Ages and, except in London, most products were locally made, sold, and used. Sometimes market exchange hardly occurred at all. As historian Patricia Crone puts it, “Where subsistence economy prevailed, every household was more or less self-sufficient and every village largely or wholly independent of the next.” The degree of isolation that prevailed is hard for the modern mind to grasp.
The results of this isolation were dramatic. Even in 18th-century England, “weights and measures still varied from one region to another,” notes historian Kirstin Olsen. Once, it could be said of France too that every province was a separate world that spoke its own language. The modern prevalence and frequency of intercity travel, let alone international travel, would astonish many of the people of the past.
The deficiencies of preindustrial transportation could harm even those who did not travel: Because transportation was rudimentary, roads were poor, and markets were underdeveloped, even small, local crop failures could prove deadly, leaving some areas short of food while nearby regions had surpluses. Today, humans have all but defeated famine and food access stands at an all-time high, thanks in part to better transport along with agricultural advances and international trade.
We too often take for granted the ability to enjoy fresh fruits from faraway lands and out of season thanks to globalized trade and transportation advances that would boggle our forebears’ minds. Indeed, modern transportation has effectively abolished the concept of “seasonality” for grocery-shoppers in advanced economies. In the United States, blueberries bear a country-of-origin label, so anyone who buys them regularly can observe, over the course of the year, as their source marches northward from Chile and Argentina through Central America, into the United States, and eventually Canada.
Yet tasting out-of-season fruits was once a luxury, remaining out of reach for the masses even as industrialization transformed food production and distribution into the early 20th century. A P.G. Wodehouse story, The Knightly Quest of Mervyn, tells of a young man’s attempts to procure strawberries for his beloved during the winter in 1930s London. “All my life I’ve wanted to eat strawberries in the middle of winter,” she tells him, going so far as to say she will consider marrying him if he can only succeed in his harrowing quest to obtain strawberries for her within a month.
In the 17th century, pineapples were known as “the fruit of kings” in Britain because they were so rare; King Charles II of England even posed for a painting with a pineapple and reportedly once offered guests the pineapple fruit from his own plate to show off. In 18th-century Britain, wealthy people would rent pineapples for a single evening to display (not eat) at dinner parties, because possessing such an exotic fruit was a status symbol in a world of slow, arduous, and costly travel.
Travel times varied in the preindustrial age from place to place, but everywhere they were painfully slow. In Crone’s words:
In the seventeenth century it took thirty days for a courier to travel the 500 miles from Istanbul to Belgrade (an army taking twice as long), and two weeks for a letter from Madrid to reach Milan; but it only took six to seven weeks for a courier to traverse the whole of inner China (i.e. ethnic China without its non-Chinese appendages). In medieval Japan, mounted messengers could cover the roughly 600 miles between Kamakura and Kyoto in five days at a pinch, and the relay runners of Inca Peru could cover the 420 miles between Lima and Cuzco in as little as three.
That gave the medieval Japanese messengers an average speed of 5 miles per hour and the Incan runners an average speed of almost 6 miles per hour, but slower speeds were more common. In 1776, Swiss physician and Russian army major Jakob Fries traveled from Omsk to Tomsk—a distance of over 550 miles—in 178 hours, maintaining an average pace of about 3 miles per hour by regularly changing horses at posting houses to ensure timely arrival at each stage. Achieving even these speeds required pushing messengers and runners to their physical limit. In India, runners began training from age seven or eight to carry the ruler’s orders on foot, relieved about every 6 miles to cover 30 miles per day.
Mail took weeks, or even months, to reach its destination; the “defeat of distance,” as economist Ernst Wagemann called it, was achieved only after 1875 with the first intercontinental cable. True global mass communication did not appear until the age of industrialization, which brought us the railway, the steamship, the telegraph, and the telephone. Even then, some places lagged behind others.
Consider Poland under communism, which stymied economic development and relegated the public to outdated modes of transportation. The historian Fernand Braudel recounts: “I have myself seen convoys of narrow, four-wheeled peasant wagons on the roads of [Kraków], in November, 1957, going to town loaded with passengers and with pine-branches, their needles trailing like hair in the dust of the road behind them. This sight . . . could have been seen in the fifteenth century.”
As transportation advances transformed the world, for the first time the profound isolation that had characterized most lives since time immemorial began to fade away. Expanded freedom of movement thanks to improved transportation transformed everyday life in every domain, from food and communications to intercultural exchange.
Amid the hustle and bustle of work commutes and the stress of flight transfers in busy airports, it can be hard to remember to feel gratitude for the wonders of modern transportation. Yet cars, trains, and airplanes are technological miracles that should never be taken for granted. Consider the sheer scale of even a relatively small country such as the United Kingdom: crossing it on foot, from Land’s End in the southwest to John o’Groats in the northeast, takes three months at minimum. Crossing the rather larger country of the United States on foot takes well over a year.
Modern transportation gives us an extraordinary freedom to move across vast distances with ease. It connects us to goods produced far beyond our communities, brings food and medicine to places that need them, lets us enjoy both the literal and figurative fruits of faroff lands, and opens doors to other cultures and experiences we might otherwise never encounter. Its influence extends far beyond getting from one place to another, shaping nearly every aspect of daily life.
Compared with most of human history, the ability to cross vast distances with remarkable speed and relative ease represents a profound transformation in how we experience the world. It is a transformation that deserves our awe, as does the genius and productive effort of the innovators who made it possible.
This article originally appeared in The Endeavourist on 10/14/2026.