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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
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.
Urban planning and zoning. They’re just planning in advance for urban sprawl and congestion. Mexico experienced a lot of growing pains (and preventable deaths) when its cities boomed and they haven’t forgotten.
Side rant: Where I used to live they zoned heavily for green areas for water absorption during rainy season and for sewage management bc it was low-lying tropical climate. Unfortunately, one big foreign hotel greasing palms and they’re building on top of a wildlife sanctuary necessary to prevent catastrophic flooding. Bye bye city buses full of people down the canal. But hey, ‘Mercia! Tourism! It brought me solace their fancy pool foundation shatters almost annually like clockwork and their pretty glass balconies kept popping from earth settling. Didn’t save the neighborhoods they destroyed by filling in a river delta though. Kept waiting for the “big one” earthquake that would bring that sucker down for good.
Out of curiosity, how long ago did they do this? Just ballpark, like 1 year, 5 years, etc.
I noticed it when I started flying in this year, it's interesting. I can't remember seeing something similar (or as pronounced) elsewhere.
I left Mexico in 2016, so it’s been a minute. But urban planning was a big field with lots of hype for up and coming university students at the time. I’d imagine this is their handiwork as graduates now. I was also on the West coast. So, I don’t know much about the Yucatán or Vera Cruz etc.
Looks like some designing made for cars
Ask a surveyor with experience in Mexico.
It looks like most of the minor streets are mostly parallel with or perpendicular to the major road to the north and the rest are aligned along the cardinal directions: north & south, east & west. Lots of the properties and their respective drainage and road right of ways were probably apportioned to align with whatever the most significant roadway or canal was in place at the time. I can see the being portioned off using simple legal language like you can buy the north 50 meters of the south 300 meters relative to "this road" and the east 50 meters of the west 200 meters relative to "this canal". You can accurately divide an area this way without any need to define a grid north, a proper grid coordinate system, and very basic survey tools.
I'd guess that the other streets oriented to the cardinal directions came later as survey tools and practices advanced or some other change in the way municipalities regulate. For example, in the U.S. you see most gridded streets and lots in older areas, relative to sections townships and ranges, but in new platted developments constantly curving streets are all the rage.
Whatever the cause, you are seeing the history of land development as the area develops it's customs around land development.
This is as good a theory as any. I also thought of range and township in the American west. Every time I end up on a road called Meridian, Baseline, Township, or something similar, I'm instantly reminded. Perhaps researching how they measured and recorded land historically would get me closer to an answer.
I don't know, but if I had to guess I'd say it was laying down the structure of a massive expansion of the city.
In the most built up part, there's the same sort of grid system, albeit pointing SW-NE, rather than N-S as with these. Maybe they're setting up for adding more and more buildings in a similar layout?
Meanwhile, just south of the edge of your pic, there's this intriguing feature!
Yes, I spotted that as well. The squiggles are very unique. In regards to the straight ones. The other spot I saw stuff like this was in Brazil. Long roads with super short side streets coming off of a major highway, parallel, but not connecting. How odd, the fact that they don't connect East-West is the weirdest part.
Yeah, that is odd - maybe they'll add them later on?
It's a very strange layout! 😁
I just had another thought on this topic, since this is the Yucatán. The Golden era Mayans built up berms to build on for roads. They’re called sacbe/sacbeob and they were generally very straight from A to B. They loved grids. I imagine modern planners are well aware of historical contexts of the region as well, not mention potentially Mayan themselves. Beyond just the shortest route from point A to B is a straight line, there may be some other underlying context like someone suggested of ease of divvying up land and drawing contracts.
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.
Not sure exactly. This reminds me of the Chilean Petroglyphs. They were etched into the land and would travel miles and miles to other settlements. Not an actual road, but a wide enough foot path. And actually etched into the rock. This could easily be remnants of past iterations of the native cultures in that region. They could be aligned with the phases of the sun. See Chaco Canyon (US) for examples.
