Transportation promotes the development and utilization of resources

1. Transportation promotes the development and utilization of resources
The state of transportation often plays a decisive role in the development, utilization, and economic value of resources; Efficient and affordable transportation can enable land to be used for multiple purposes.
2. Transportation is beneficial for expanding the market and can create significant spatial and temporal effects
For most people, places with relatively convenient transportation and easy access for people and goods are considered good places for commodity exchange. Over time, this place will become a relatively fixed market. After the market exchange reaches a certain scale, people will improve the relevant transportation conditions, such as improving road (or navigation) conditions and adding some better transportation equipment to adapt to and meet the continuous expansion of the market size.
The improvement of the transportation system has not only expanded the market area, but also increased the exchange scale of the market itself, providing a prerequisite for large-scale commodity sales (see the figure below).
From this, it can be seen that when using an inefficient transportation system, goods from A cannot be sold in the B market. However, after improving the original transportation system (reducing transportation costs between A and B), goods from A can be sold smoothly in B. Transportation creates "spatial utility" and expands the market scope of goods.
The above analysis has shown that improving the transportation system can expand the distance of goods transportation, thereby expanding the market scope. Here, the rate of market expansion will exceed the rate of increased transportation distance. The famous transportation economist D. Lardner referred to this phenomenon as the square law of transportation and trade. As shown in the following figure.
If a manufacturer located in location A can use a certain transportation system to transport their products to any place within a 100km range and sell them at competitive prices, their corresponding market range is C1; When the transportation system is improved and the transportation cost is reduced by half compared to the original, the manufacturer can double the supply distance to 200km with the same transportation cost, and the corresponding market range is C2. Obviously, the expansion ratio of the market scope at this time is three times the expansion ratio of the transportation distance.
Transportation can not only create significant "spatial utility" in the process of market development, but also have significant "temporal utility".
The time utility and spatial utility of transportation are closely related. The demand for a certain product in the market often has a strong time limit, beyond which the demand for the product will greatly decrease or even completely disappear. If a product loses market demand due to time constraints, it will no longer have value or its value will be greatly discounted within a specific period of time. Efficient transportation can ensure timely delivery of goods within the time required by the market, thereby creating a "time utility" and thriving the market. Like the spatial utility of transportation, the temporal utility of transportation can also expand the market. For example, when a product is urgently needed in a certain region, the transportation speed of the product becomes the most critical factor (assuming that the product needs to be transferred in from other places). According to Radner's law, when the transportation speed is doubled, the potential market range can be expanded by three times.