A road connecting two cities is usually built to the same standard along its whole length. The final kilometre into a village frequently is not, and that kilometre determines a surprising amount.
The economics are straightforward. The main road serves many people and is justified by traffic counts. A spur serving three hundred people cannot be justified the same way, so it is built later, to a lower standard, or not at all. A village two kilometres from a good road and connected by a track that floods for four months is, for those four months, further from the city than the distance suggests.
What follows is measurable. Studies of rural roads consistently find that the largest gains come not from upgrading main routes but from the connections at the end, and that the effects show up in places people do not expect: school attendance in the wet season, the price farmers receive because more than one buyer can reach them, and the number of births attended by a trained person.
The pattern is general enough to have a name in several fields. A network is only as useful as its weakest connection to each user, and investment tends to flow to the parts of the network that are already busy, because that is where the measured demand is.
The demand at the end of the track is invisible precisely because the track is bad, which is the circular problem that such investment has to break deliberately.
Vocabulary in this text
- connect /kəˈnɛkt/ — to join two things, or to link to a network
- whole /ˈhoʊl/ — complete, all of something
- amount /əˈmaʊnt/ — how much there is of something
- justify /ˈdʒʌstəˌfaɪ/ — to give good reasons for something
- flood /ˈflʌd/ — a large amount of water covering land
- suggest /səˈdʒɛst/ — to offer an idea for someone to consider
- rural /ɹˈʊɹəl/ — in the countryside
- expect /ɪkˈspɛkt/ — to think that something will happen
- attend /əˈtɛnd/ — to go to an event, school or class
- train /tɹˈeɪn/ — to teach a model by showing it many examples