The Economics of Transportation Network Growth

A number of factors influence the efficiency, productivity, and welfare of transportation networks. Travel demand, user costs, and facility supply costs equilibrate on various time scales under a set of pricing (taxes and tolls), investment and ownership policies. The growth (and decline) of transportation networks obviously affects the social and economic activities that a region can support, yet the dynamics of how such growth occurs is one of the least understood areas in transportation, geography, urban economics, and regional science. This chapter is therefore exploratory in nature, investigating these modeling needs and possible solutions. Another purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how a network growth model can improve transportation planning in ways shortrun network models cannot achieve