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.
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