Moreover, in transportation industries, it is not easy to devise (much less practically carry out) spatial fixes as counterweights to labor's strong workplace bargaining power. Particularly troublesome nodes might be eliminated entirely fr om the distribution network - that is, unruly or otherwise unprofitable nodes can be cut off from networks of trade and production. But the upstream and downstream ramifications for all other industries of such a spatial fix in transportation makes it a heavy-handed solution at best (especially if the region as a whole to be cut off is not plagued by generalized problems of profitability and control). Moreover, "roads, railways, canals, airports, etc., cannot be moved without the value embodied in them being lost," creating the paradoxical situation whereby the mobility of capital requires relatively immobile investments in the transportation industries (Harvey 1999: 380). Thus, the disincentives to geographical relocation facing the transportation industries are on average significantly higher than the deterrents facing even the most capital-intensive manufacturing industries. Indeed, the fact that the reports of transportation workers' unrest in the WLG database are consistently spread widely across the globe throughout the 1870-1996 period suggests that spatial fixes have not been the main response to transport worker unrest.
Technological fixes have, on the other hand, been far more significant in the arsenal of employer responses to transportation worker labor unrest. The most widely studied case is that of containerization and dock automation in the shipping industry. These process innovations dramatically downsized the historically militant dock labor force in the second half of the twentieth century and in large part account for the dramatic decline in labor unrest mentions discussed earlier. Where substantial transformations in the transport labor process have been less forthcoming, product fixes have been the more prominent response. Thus, for example, railroads and railroad workers have come under increasing competitive pressure from new alternatives: trucking and aviation for cargo and the automobile and aviation for passengers.