Road[edit]
Main article: Road transport
The Harbor Freeway is often heavily congested at rush hour in Downtown Los Angeles.
A road is an identifiable route, way or path between two or more places.[4] Roads are typically smoothed, paved, or otherwise prepared to allow easy travel;[5] though they need not be, and historically many roads were simply recognizable routes without any formal construction or maintenance.[6] In urban areas, roads may pass through a city or village and be named as streets, serving a dual function as urban space easement and route.[7]
The most common road vehicle is the automobile; a wheeled passenger vehicle that carries its own motor. Other users of roads include buses, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians. As of 2010, there were 1.015 billion automobiles worldwide. Road transport offers a complete freedom to road users to transfer the vehicle from one lane to the other and from one road to another according to the need and convenience. This flexibility of changes in location, direction, speed, and timings of travel is not available to other modes of transport. It is possible to provide door to door service only by road transport.
Automobiles provide high flexibility with low capacity, but require high energy and area use, and are the main source of noise and air pollution in cities; buses allow for more efficient travel at the cost of reduced flexibility.[8] Road transport by truck is often the initial and final stage of freight transport.