von Thünen's isolated state model of exurban land use (1826), possibly the earliest geographic theory, directly incorporated the cost of transportation of different agricultural products as one of the determinants for how far from a town each type of goods could be produced profitably.
[7] In the era of geographic information systems, starting in the 1970s, many of the existing proximity models and new algorithms were automated as analysis tools, making them significantly easier to use by a wider set of professionals.
These tools have tended to focus on problems that could be solved deterministically, such as buffers, Cost distance analysis, interpolation and network routing.
Of the many (but finite) possible routes through the road network, the one with the shortest distance passes through residential neighborhoods with low speed limits and frequent stops.
An alternative route follows a bypass highway around the neighborhoods, having a significantly longer distance, with much higher speed limits and infrequent stops.
Other costs are much more difficult to measure due to their qualitative or subjective nature, such as political protest or ecological impact; these typically require the creation of "pseudo-measures" in the form of indices or scales to operationalize.
One of the most profound effects of the technological advances since 1800, including the railroad, the automobile, and the telephone, has been to drastically reduce the costs of moving people, goods, and information over long distances.
It has been argued that the virtual elimination of the friction of distance in many aspects of society has resulted in the "death of Geography," in which relative location is no longer relevant to many tasks in which it formerly played a crucial role.
[17] This includes the lifestyle amenities of a place, such as local natural landscapes or urban nightlife that must be experienced in person (thus requiring physical travel and thus entailing the friction of distance).
Also, many people prefer in-person interactions that could technically be conducted remotely, such as business meetings, education, tourism, and shopping, which should make distance-based effects relevant for the foreseeable future.