Why do the roads SW of Cancun make such weird patterns. It’s almost like a ladder or just long roads to nowhere with single houses on either side. I have seen this in other central/south American countries as well. What political/legal/geographical/etc factors make it turn out like this?
I >>KNOW<< there is someone out there who can understand and explain this satisfactorily. I just need to find the right community, group, etc.
Boring straight lines; easiest (cheapest) way to add infrastructure (not just roads, think water, sewage etc as well)…it’s all over NA, so why not in a popular tourist destination. Perhaps to attract some foreign investment into housing?
It’s just far from finished. Wouldn’t be surprised if it was too expensive for locals already and not interesting enough for foreigners at whatever the price point is. So there you have whatever the municipality approved already, pushing to have an extended road built with few side roads, since it would be crazy inefficient to do few meters at a time, and once you have the main road, you can easily add onto it.
About the curved bit mentioned - likely gonna be more expensive housing where rich folks don’t have to look at the road/neighbours fence but instead their private little pond/lake. The name of the business next road over tells you all you need to know (“Villas Dubai” lmao)
“Boring straight lines” as you put it are also a way for the poorest land owners to describe, subdivide, buy, and sell property using simple easy to understand language, often without even the need for a surveyor or a lawyer to get involved. Curved boundary lines are a clear indicator of commercial development at the higher end of that spectrum. Ordinary folks are not going to have the necessary training to do anything to directly subdivide property described in that way without involving lawyers and surveyors.
Moreover, you often can’t sell a property without ingress and egress access to some public right of way. The same rules for simplicity of geometry apply to those right of ways too. Curves are vague and require complex legalese to describe in words. It also wasn’t too long ago that the precision of survey tools just did not exist to accurately describe parcels as anything but straight line distances with sometimes VERY vague information about orientation. Only more recent subdivisions (often much less than about 100 years old) include curves described with any decent level of precision. When they do describe curves on older documents it’s almost always in reference to large curves along existing structures (like railroads) and the actual geometry of that curve is not fully defined.
What we see here is only tangentially related to tourism in that it is directly related to the entire business of land development, which includes everything else.