Traversability burden is the model’s attempt to make traversability measurable rather than merely felt. It gathers the real cost of moving through a structure into a comparable quantity:
Traversability burden ≈ time + cost + cognitive load + procedural uncertainty + dependency + delay required to complete a legitimate pathway.
It is not meant as a single universal score — like ecological capacity, it resists collapse into one number — but it is enough to compare structures honestly. If one city takes two days to issue a routine license and another takes eight months, or one healthcare pathway takes three steps and another fifteen, the difference is real and consequential. The burden is read off actual journeys through a pathway audit, which makes it directly actionable: it points to the specific steps, handoffs, and delays that should be removed. Treating this burden as a genuine cost is what turns “administrative hassle” into something a serious ecology measures and reduces, because the human life it consumes is capacity the field never gets back. See Building and Defending It.