Recently, the concept of regional (territorial) development has attracted worldwide research attention. Affordable transportation plays an important role in sustainable regional development, since it catalyzes diverse movement of people and subsequent social interactions across multiple spatial levels. This idea is referred to as affordable access in this paper, and Belgium’s inexpensive railway system provides an insightful example. The present paper investigates the introduction and subsequent development of Belgium’s railway system from the early 19th to the late 20th century. Affordable access in Belgium appears to originate from the workman’s ticket first issued in 1870. There appears to be several important factors in the implementation of this plan: (i) the horizontal power relationship between urban and rural areas inherited from pre-independent Belgium territory, (ii) demands from laborers and activists to remedy the socio-economic problems caused by the exploitation of labor and temporary but signifiant depopulation in major agricultural regions, and (iii) densely developed infrastructure network as one of few available resources for solving growing inequalities between urban and rural areas. The analysis showed that affordable access had become nationwide by the early 20th century, and had structured territorial settlement.This paper also classifies Belgium’s demographic trend and analyzes the urbanization of a rual local from the middle 19th century to the early 21st century. The influence of affordable access in regional development is clarified. Largely driven by individual ownership of housing developments, affordable access equalized developmental potential across the territory. Consequently, regional development in Belgium displays a horizontal and egalitarian character. The majority of rural municipalities, regardless of their previous population history, were demographically stable and elastic. This characteristic may be regarded as fractal. From medium and small town centers to rural villages and hamlets, and part of the territory became a seed of urbanization, absorbing its population influx and subsequently generating a particular mosaic of residential urbanization.Finally, this paper investigates the quality of social life in rural Belgium. To this end, it analyzes the lifestyle of her young inhabitants. The results showed that rural social life and attitudes toward future living are enhanced by a cyclic process of urban–rural displacement. As a case study, the author qualitatively and quantitatively interviewed 21 and 150 students in Leuven, respectively, where the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium’s largest and most influential university, enrolls more than 50% of Belgian students studying at tertiary level. According to the empirical findings, affordable access not only encourages diverse social interactions and strengthens social bonds among rural inhabitants but also shapes individuals’ residential preferences. The analysis showed the importance of these social factors in the continuous urbanization of rural Belgium.Based on these findings, this paper summarizes the background of a socially emancipating transportation policy and its multiple roles in realizing urban–rural cohesion in Belgium.