Transportation has been. largely overlooked as a support infrastructure to high technology economic development. Some recent state and local initiatives and technical articles show an increased awareness of transportation's role in high technology economic development in such areas as air passenger service and air freight, proximity to freeways, and access to campuslike industrial sites and suburban housing. To date, transportation planning for high technology has been namperect by~ ack of specificity (eg, what are the high technology air freight sensitive industries?). The utility of conventional definitions of high technology manufacturing is examined. With the aid of the Commodity Transportation Survey of the Census of Transportation, 1977, a list of high technology, high air freight commodities is obtained. These commodity types, at the five-digit level, prove to be useful for the study of geographic variability in air freight utilization between production areas in the United States. The list is shown to be sufficiently discriminatory to provide a starting point for local planning of air freight demand by high technology manufacturing.

The role of high technology in local, regional, and national economic development has been hotly debated in recent years. State and local governments have rushed to attract high technology growth with a multiplicity of initiatives, including research and development (R&D) tax incentives, R&D grants, publicly initiated venture capital pools, business and technical assistance, industry-university joint ventuc" s, dll< l sLdLe scleuce and technology policy councils< ll. In an earlier paper (~), the authors pointed out that transportation, and physical infrastructure in general, have been overlooked as tools Lo promote the economic development of advanced technologies. This probably stems from the misconception that high technology is a footloose industry. In fact, more recent and integrative strategies for high technology industrial development have been including transportation and land development considerations (eg, the" technology corridor" concept in Tennessee, transportation planning for a high technology corridor by the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission in Pennsylvania, and the location of technology parks and foreign trade zones in the vicinity of international airports such as in Boston).