Where the Road Ends? Eminent Domain?

Location: End of the "Old Wagon Road," Sababurg Sim

I've been curious about what the Linden Lab Department of Public Works has been doing.

I'd read that the Lindens have a public-roads project to provide interesting highways. You can see the proposed routes from the Linden's Wiki, posted nearly a year ago. I love the idea of these roads, but what will Linden Lab do when the new route bisects a resident's land?

On one side of the screen, real-life governments exercise eminent domain to get land from owners. Here's a good example of where SL may be posed for an evolutionary change that could violate the libertarian ethos of the virtual world, or where the sheer unreality of SL will trump any metaphors we try to drag along from our world.

Perhaps the Lindens will simply wait for lands beyond the end of the road to go on the market and buy them up. Then the Old Wagon Road will continue.

The Lindens seem to have adopted a tongue-and-cheek approach to the situation where, where the road ends. It's one of the few places in-world where a map tells me "you are here" and provides a bit of verisimilitude as to SL.



I don't know if the billboards I saw are an inside joke at some resident ("those losers in Ellingson") who would not sell his or her land, a chamber-of-commerce plug to go to Ogilvie to drive on a completed road, or something else that just escapes me.



Just how long it will be before SL beauties tear down the roads on Vespas, like characters in a Fellini film? I don't know, but Olivia Hotshot already got this photo.



Not long before such scenes get more common, I'd bet: build it, and they'll drive.