Perhaps more importantly, which star to which star? There are thousands of stars of interest in the Trek neighborhood. A direct route from 47 to 316 might never become an important spacelane when so many ships would be going from 521 to 317 and from 112 to 315, the traffic thus converging on that particular average path towards the general 315-317 neighborhood and attracting all the deuterium refill stations and traffic control nets - and leaving the direct line from 47 high and dry and attractive only to pirates valuing their privacy.
Even on the featureless high seas of yore, traffic found "lanes" that would connect key ports but also attract ships traveling between a completely different pair of ports. This would have been mostly a feature of the steam age when ports were much more important to ships than in the days of sail, though. Would Trek ships in general be attracted to "coaling stations" when we see that Starfleet starships at least don't need regular refills of any sort? Perhaps not. But civilian vessels might still be attracted to a system of hub-and-spokes travel. Or then simply to other ships, for purposes of trading en route, safety in numbers, stalking of prey, ambulance chasing etc.
The attraction of the vicinity of Delta Vega remains quite a mystery. We could argue Starfleet had wonderful reasons for choosing that spot (and perhaps founding Delta Vega specifically to support a push to the unknown through that spot), but Kirk comments on no such reasons when declaring it "impossible" that another Earth ship might once have traveled to the same spot...
Timo Saloniemi
Even on the featureless high seas of yore, traffic found "lanes" that would connect key ports but also attract ships traveling between a completely different pair of ports. This would have been mostly a feature of the steam age when ports were much more important to ships than in the days of sail, though. Would Trek ships in general be attracted to "coaling stations" when we see that Starfleet starships at least don't need regular refills of any sort? Perhaps not. But civilian vessels might still be attracted to a system of hub-and-spokes travel. Or then simply to other ships, for purposes of trading en route, safety in numbers, stalking of prey, ambulance chasing etc.
The attraction of the vicinity of Delta Vega remains quite a mystery. We could argue Starfleet had wonderful reasons for choosing that spot (and perhaps founding Delta Vega specifically to support a push to the unknown through that spot), but Kirk comments on no such reasons when declaring it "impossible" that another Earth ship might once have traveled to the same spot...
Timo Saloniemi