  The structure and evolution of Terrestrial Transportation Infrastructures
(TTIs) are shaped by both socio-political and geographical factors, hence
encoding crucial information about how resources and power are distributed
through a territory. Therefore, analysing pathway, railway or road networks
allows us to gain a better understanding of the political and social
organization of the communities that created and maintained them. Network
science can provide extremely useful tools to address quantitatively this
issue. Here, focusing on passengers transport, we propose a methodology for
mapping a TTI into a formal network object able to capture both the spatial
distribution of the population and the connections provided by the considered
mean of transport. Secondly, we present a simple mechanistic model that
implements a wide spectrum of decision-making mechanisms which could have
driven the creation of links (connections). Thus, by adjusting few parameters,
for any empirical system, it is possible to generate a synthetic counterpart
such that their differences are minimized. By means of such inverse engineering
approach, we are able to shed some light on the processes and forces that
moulded transportation infrastructures into their current configuration,
without having to rely on any additional information besides the topology of
the network and the distribution of the population. An illustrative example is
also provided to showcase the applications of the proposed methodology and
discuss how our conclusions fit with previously acquired knowledge (and
literature) on the topic.
