You hit the nail on the head workout realizing it. The real problem is mass property ownership in remote areas. The huge uptick in car travelers and according roads are a result of that.
The classic "road trueism" is If you build them, they will fill.
Four lane highways with occassional gridlock when expanded become six lane highways with occassional gridlock.
The connection corollary that follows is roads | train lines built to connect A and B will often be followed by small townsites along the way and the spread of "off the grid" living at blocks T junctioning dirt road access from the new A <--> B route.
There are plenty of rural roads and highways that disprove your point.
We fill roads in cities because the population wants/needs to travel. If we would instead build trains those would fill instead. Trains are a lot more cost effective in cities, but no city (not even transit cities like Paris) builds enough of them to make trains a better alternative than cars.
Note that by the time anyone realizes roads are full and they need "one more lane" the road has 6 times more cars on it than it can safely handle - people just give up their safe following distance. One more reason to build trains.
My point was that road access introduced through previously road vehicle inaccessable regions often (not always) leads to more human activity and dwelling in the vicinity of that road.
It's not always the case that people appearing from ships, airdrops, or walking in results in roads following them.
When my own family first settled in Australia it took 80+ years on the European side for roads to reach them (they used flat bottomed boats on tidal flats to transit goods and livestock), and some 70K years or so on the non European side.
But nobody builds a road to nowhere. You only build a road when there is demand, often from property owners, to be able to reach a place more easily. Thus I repeat the issue is not the roads, they are merely a consequence of the property ownership increasing travel to a remote area.
Consider: would a road nobody traveled on be any issue for the tortoises? Clearly not.
Connecting two occupied points is the exact opposite of building a road to nowhere.
And see my point here about “linear” roads (connecting point to point) vs space-filling ones (providing access to an entire grid of houses). In short, an animal can exist very easily in the proximity of a single highway, but existing surrounded by development is a much harder task.
> Connecting two occupied points is the exact opposite of building a road to nowhere.
I'm at a loss as to why you even bought it up. My intial comment here:
roads | train lines built to connect A and B will often be followed by small townsites along the way and the spread of "off the grid" living at blocks T junctioning dirt road access from the new A <--> B route.
was about development following roads that connect places and that development expanding outwards into what was once "nowhere".
Induced demand is a worthless concept. What they call induced demand exsits, but the name is misleading - better to call that latent demand. People want to do things and the city form isn't allowing them to. Once the city form allows it they will.
That it doesn't exist in rural areas improves that it isn't induced it is already there.
> You hit the nail on the head workout realizing it. The real problem is mass property ownership in remote areas. The huge uptick in car travelers and according roads are a result of that.
JTNP draws massive numbers of tourists. Plus the main road through my neck of the Mojave (62 and Amboy Rd.) is a popular alternate route linking LA and Las Vegas. You wouldn't believe how much traffic blasts through on weekends and holidays, most without even stopping. It's a lot of city folks driving like they're passing through an uninhabitable wasteland where speed limits don't exist.
The actual number of owners/residents like me out by my hood is on the order of hundreds, and most drive exceptionally slow in the hood because those roads are unpaved washboard insanity.
Airbnb/VHRs becoming a thing there and catering to the national park has made things much worse in terms of local vehicle traffic even on the dirt roads... but the Tortoises were already gone long before Airbnb even existed.
TL;DR: Tourism by automobile is the main problem, exacerbated by the draw of a popular national park. But even without it there's too much thanks to LA<->Vegas traffic.
“We aren’t the problem, it’s the out of towners that are the issue!”
Wouldn’t we all like to believe so much.
But in reality the roads taking folks all over JT and to/from Vegas cut the land into ~6 massive lattice cells. Those roads have basically 0 impact on turtle populations because their linear nature makes them effectively insignificant at the scale of the desert. On the other hand, the land ownership grid gives rise to a space-filling-curve of road that dominates the affected landscape and an effectively infinite number of microscopic lattice cells that are too small to support any population, and thus force the animals to migrate over roads constantly.
The parcels in question (near JTNP) are almost entirely empty BLM land that was bought up in masse by housing developers, developed, then cut up and sold to individuals. BLM wasn’t going around building gross grids into their parcels in hope to drive the value up for homeowners.
You hit the nail on the head workout realizing it. The real problem is mass property ownership in remote areas. The huge uptick in car travelers and according roads are a result of that.