What comes first: people or roads?

In Wednesday's class our professor posed to us the following question: What comes to an area first, people or transportation? I believe that both cases exist but in different stages of development. Initially, people precede transportation systems. It's not logical to simply build a road to nowhere; a road is first built because people have the need to get from one place to another and at both ends of the road there must be something worth traveling to. Once this road has been established it is likely that it will become increasingly used. With this increased density on the road, people will begin to stop along the way and choose to settle or build around this important artery of transportation. So in this stage of development, it is clear that transportation precedes people. 

Introduction to my blog.

This is a blog I've created as part of my Transportation Engineering course here at Lafayette College. Transportation is all around us and it is something we certainly cannot live without. Not only must humans be able to transport themselves from place to place but also animals, materials, and the earth itself. Life on Earth isn't still; it's moving, adapting, growing, flourishing, diminishing. In today's world, we have complex systems of multimodal transportation and throughout the course of this fall semester I will be exploring and analyzing these systems as part of my class.