Impact of Highway System on Productivity

Why is a blog on mobile discussing the US Highway System and its impact on productivity? Because one of the key contentions of "MobileTectonics" is that there are a discrete number of infrastructure platforms that have driven a substantial amount of US productivity over the past century - the electric grid, the railway network, the highway network, the POTS telecom network, the Internet. This attached document goes into some depth (based on a rich base of academic work) to show that the impact of the Highway system was in the range of $2-3 Trillion dollars of measured increased production over 40 years, a material share of productivitiy growth during the Post-War period, and a high return on the invested capital (in this case invested by the government). In addition, there is likely 2-3x that amount that has not been captured.

http://www.publicpurpose.com/freeway1.htm

If we think about some key features of American life that we take for granted but are the direct result of the Highway system (and cheap gas), they include: the emergence of out-of-city big box and mall centers; the massive growth of suburbia and exurbia; the adoption of just-in-time logistics; substantial reductions in deaths and injuries from driving; increase in flexibility and mobility of the US labor force; massive construction boom in cheap land that was previously out of commuting range, and so on and so forth. One can debate whether each of these developments is unambiguously positive, but fundamentally all these changes are driven by peoples' choices, so we can probably assume that they chose what they felt was best for them (if you detect a hint of Ayn Rand, you might be right). In any case, the interesting thing is how much of the American way of life was impacted by this investment.

It is also true that back in the 1950s when the Highway System was being built, very few people predicted the transformation that would ensue. Nevertheless, the changes were in many ways predictable - for example, the increase in speed leads to extending the commutable range and thus the expansion of suburbs; similarly, it enables the emergence of big box stores that are able to serve large catchment areas.

The question I would thus postulate is: can the wireless/broadband infrastructure, which has pretty recently become available, drive a comparable revolution, that when we look back 5, 10, 20 years from now we will find somewhat incredible? What are they key inevitable drivers of these shifts? How do we think these will materialize?