MAHDI

Over the last decade, we have created the most comprehensive historical transport network data for Britain and France. This project aims to use these data to explore how transport has changed core parameters of economic activity since the seventeenth century. We will use our new multimodal model to answer key questions in transport geography, economic history, and urban economics, such as the impact of different networks' growth, how transport infrastructure and technology affected the economy, and how changes in market access influenced population density, economic development, and living standards. This will enable us to understand these changes and help others formulate policy recommendations. The project will provide consistent and long-term data on accessibility to answer fundamental questions in regional planning. Why do some towns or regions thrive while others decline? How do transportation networks contribute to spatial inequalities? To what extent does public policy influence network organization? It will also provide new tools to analyse past transport infrastructure developments and their impacts on spatial inequalities, environmental effects, and economic and social change. The project's data-driven models will be valuable for informing transport and regional policies and will be used by specialised agencies and NGOs worldwide to analyse human mobility in the 21st century. We will make all of this data freely available to researchers according to the FAIR principles: Findable through publications, Accessible through data warehouses, Interoperable with other databases, and Reusable across scientific fields by researchers interested in network analysis.