Toward Closing the Loop between Infrastructure Investments and Societal and Economic Impacts

Some of these effects occur over a short period of time and soon after the investment materializes, whereas others take longer and follow more steady patterns.

In this article, we develop a novel dynamical model of a primal society with constructs that are specifically geared toward transportation infrastructure expansions and investments. The model quantifies the impact of these expansions on some key performance indicators and on the overall utility and production capacity of the society. We argue that traditional analytical models that work on the premises of stationary behavior and a static response of society to changes in infrastructure do not correctly capture these effects.