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.
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.