Section Line Roads in the U.S. Great Plains

Abstract

The landscape of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS), or township and range system, is a well-known feature of the U.S. Great Plains. The area displays a checkerboard pattern of farm fields with a grid of roads, plainly visible from the air. Despite being a substantial component of transportation infrastructure, the mileage of section line roads has never been tallied, nor has their distribution been studied relative to population, land use, or environmental factors that might be important in the region. Although they are often said to be ubiquitous, even this has not been examined. The section line road network of five Great Plains states is examined here. A set of procedures was used in geographic information systems to identify section line roads, which were then analyzed with population and land-use variables. The results show that section line roads are not strongly related to either population or land use but do show some correspondence to environmental conditions such as precipitation, a legacy of the settlement of the Great Plains.

Key Words:

• Great Plains
• network
• Public Land Survey System
• road
• township and range

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The use of 1900 or earlier population values was attempted, with boundaries extracted from Atlas of Historical County Boundaries online but the number and boundaries of counties differed considerably from the present data, and lists of population and road mileage from Eldridge (1907) did not fully coincide with the counties. For this reason, the use of a historic comparison was not attempted.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joe Weber

JOE WEBER is a Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35401. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the development of highway networks and the changing geography of the National Park System.