  The key to traffic prediction is to accurately depict the temporal dynamics
of traffic flow traveling in a road network, so it is important to model the
spatial dependence of the road network. The essence of spatial dependence is to
accurately describe how traffic information transmission is affected by other
nodes in the road network, and the GNN-based traffic prediction model, as a
benchmark for traffic prediction, has become the most common method for the
ability to model spatial dependence by transmitting traffic information with
the message passing mechanism. However, existing methods model a local and
static spatial dependence, which cannot transmit the global-dynamic traffic
information (GDTi) required for long-term prediction. The challenge is the
difficulty of detecting the precise transmission of GDTi due to the uncertainty
of individual transport, especially for long-term transmission. In this paper,
we propose a new hypothesis\: GDTi behaves macroscopically as a transmitting
causal relationship (TCR) underlying traffic flow, which remains stable under
dynamic changing traffic flow. We further propose spatial-temporal Granger
causality (STGC) to express TCR, which models global and dynamic spatial
dependence. To model global transmission, we model the causal order and causal
lag of TCRs global transmission by a spatial-temporal alignment algorithm. To
capture dynamic spatial dependence, we approximate the stable TCR underlying
dynamic traffic flow by a Granger causality test. The experimental results on
three backbone models show that using STGC to model the spatial dependence has
better results than the original model for 45 min and 1 h long-term prediction.
