Getting from Point A to Point B (and How to Improve It)

April 30, 2026

The saying "time is money on this job" is a maxim in the transportation sector. A new method of economic research in use at the Atlanta Fed aims to provide policymakers with information they can use to improve transportation networks to foster cost-effective, efficient movement of goods and people.

This research strategy is in keeping with the work people have conducted over the ages to reduce travel time and its inherent cost. In industry, the cost of travel time is evident when the rate of movement of workers or resources slows the pace of production. With people, the cost of mobility appears in lost opportunities to engage in other activities.

The new wave of research is known as modern spatial economics. It builds on earlier work by using economic theory and detailed data to quantify how geography shapes economic activity-where people live and work, where firms produce, and how goods and people move across space. In transportation applications, that richer framework can incorporate features such as congestion and route choice.

This improves economists' ability to evaluate how easily and quickly goods and people move under different scenarios. The resulting information can help policymakers assess which transportation investments are likely to generate the greatest economic benefits.

Atlanta Fed research economist Simon Fuchs is using modern spatial economics, in conjunction with colleagues at several institutions, to evaluate aspects of the nation's transportation network. Fuchs describes the data derived from the new approach as "essential" to the Federal Reserve's assessments of price stability, labor market conditions, and the resilience of the broader economy. This is because of the sizable role transportation networks plays in supply chains, Fuchs said.

"Transportation networks are a critical, yet often overlooked, channel through which local disruptions become national macroeconomic issues," Fuchs said. "Yet, despite its critical importance, transportation has historically been understudied in economics. Much of planning focuses on engineering metrics - travel times, traffic counts - while overlooking the broader economic feedbacks that determine how improvements or disruptions ripple across regions and markets."

The research in which Fuchs engages has been recognized with grants, including one from the Transportation Economics sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the US Department of Transportation, and the National Science Foundation. In addition, Fuchs has presented the work at more than 70 conferences in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

But what is it, exactly, that comes out of the modern spatial economic research?

Two studies of the United States transportation system provide insight. Research revealed the possibility that improvements to just one component of the transportation system can increase the productivity of the entire system.

An examination of the intermodal system showed the intermodal terminals with the worst bottlenecks are centrally located in the United States, in inland hubs such as Chicago and Dallas that facilitate the transport of goods between coastal and interior regions. Strategic investments in terminals with bottlenecks "can enhance the robustness and efficiency of transport networks, supporting global and local trade as well as economic stability," states the report Fuchs produced with colleague Woan Foong Wong, with the University of Oregon and the Centre for Economic Policy Research, Multimodal Transport Networks. The study was issued in 2022 and updated in 2024.

A second paper delved into the highway system and showed the possibility that a single improvement to a highway, which by itself may not make that much difference in its immediate area, could have a significant impact on the region's broader transportation network. As observed in the working paper "Evaluating Transportation Improvements Quantitatively: A Primer, " released by the Atlanta Fed in October 2025, by Fuchs; Treb Allen, of Dartmouth College and the NBER, and Wong, Fuchs' collaborator on the multimodal examination:

• "Upgrading a link can be worth less than suggested by the pure cost savings on that link, yet worth more than suggested by road data alone once spillovers onto rail, barge, and competing highways are counted. Recognizing these interactions is essential for ranking investments when scarce dollars must be allocated across a tightly coupled multimodal freight system."

Overall, the authors of the two studies generally determined the studies' findings suggest results produced by models based on modern spatial economics are measurably different from results derived under the traditional models. These differences are important and future research in this area could determine how to prepare findings that policymakers could use when carefully considering the use of scant public dollars to create transportation improvements that yield the biggest bang for the buck.

Fuchs brings to his work a lifelong interest in transportation challenges. He points to a childhood spent playing "countless hours" of "Transportation Tycoon," a business simulation game where players profit by moving people and goods by air, land, and sea. That interest held and led to five degrees in economics, including three masters and one bachelor degrees, before Fuchs earned his doctorate in economics in 2018 from the Toulouse School of Economics in France. Fuchs joined the Atlanta Fed in 2019 and specializes in macroeconomic effects of the spatial distribution of economic activity, a field he views as having the capacity to improve the world.

"My motivation is to bring rigorous economic tools to transportation questions so we can better understand how infrastructure investment, logistics performance, and supply-chain resilience ultimately shape welfare, opportunity and economic stability," Fuchs said. "These effects aren't abstract-they show up in household budgets, in job opportunities, in the reliability of essential goods."