The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on our daily lives. Reduced mobility has increased the up-take of digitalisation, accelerating on-going trends such as teleworking and e-commerce, raising questions about the type of transport infrastructure we have in place today – as well as the one we will need in an uncertain future.

Transport infrastructure connects businesses, people and places. It provides firms with access to markets, workers with access to jobs and cities and regions with access to the global economy. Transport infrastructure has been a necessary condition for economic development for centuries and remains an important factor in the catching up of economically weaker regions. Public investment reflects its importance. In many OECD member countries, total inland transport infrastructure investment, i.e. investment in road and rail, amounts to more than 1% of gross domestic product (GDP), not even accounting for maintenance spending for the existing stock.

This chapter provides an overview of recent trends on transport infrastructure development in European and OECD member countries and reviews the main benefits associated with it. It starts with a description of how transport infrastructure investment has changed across countries and regions, both in terms of the magnitude and its composition, paying particular attention to differences between urban and rural regions. Next, it moves onto reviewing the main benefits associated with an efficient transport system, all while making suggestions on how current evaluation tools, such as cost-benefit analysis, could be improved to account for all of them. It emphasises the need for different metrics that can better capture the potential of transport infrastructure improvements and the importance of taking a “more aggregate” view when evaluating investment projects that can account for potential displacement of economic activity. The main benefits are discussed in reference to the type of investment: interregional highway and railway – both traditional and high-speed – development, highway development in the proximity of cities and infrastructure development within cities.

This chapter discusses the role of transport for quality of life in cities and provides an analysis of how well local transport systems do in terms of connecting citizens with surrounding opportunities in different cities and for different socio-economic groups. It starts with a presentation of different channels through which transport policy matters for life in cities, most notably its role at fostering the transition towards a climate-neutral economy. Next, it moves to the description of how accessibility, i.e. the number of opportunities reachable from a given place in a given time by a given transport mode, and other transport quality indicators vary across cities of different countries and different sizes. It analyses the sizeable and positive accessibility gap between high- and low-income groups within cities and between cities in the same country. It concludes with potential explanations and suggested ways forward to improve accessibility inclusiveness in countries.