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” 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.