The impact of new systems of transport and communications as experienced by the individual, and especially the emphasis given by modernity to ‘the shock of the new’, immediacy, and simultaneity. The major periods of time–space compression are from about 1850 to 1914, and from the late 20th century onwards, when there occurred ‘a radical restructuring in the nature and experience of both time and space…with a dissolution or collapse of traditional spatial co-ordinates’ (J. May and N. Thrift 2001). Janelle (2003) UCSB colloquium, provides the following data for Los Angeles to Santa Barbara: