The purpose of this article is to highlight an overlooked impact of transportation improvements--the ways improvements stimulate innovation and the development of technologies. Social and economic progress is then achieved through the use of new technologies. Does consideration of technological impacts clarify understandings of transportation improvements? Using IVHS as a case in point, this article treats that question after providing a classification of impacts and discussing the mechanisms yielding impacts. Although recognizing that there are many factors involved, the authors highlight technology as the engine of economic and social progress. The authors regard technologies as ways of doing things embodied in human skills, products, processes and institutions.