Transport Speed Sets Land Tradeoffs

Transportation technology determines the geographic extent of the labor market: when people could only walk or ride horses, the city was constrained to within about an hour's travel, but modern transport puts the same hour's commute much farther away, allowing households with identical incomes to choose between a bigger house far out where land is cheap or a smaller unit near the center where land is expensive—a self-generated price mechanism that continually adjusts the housing stock to what people want.