Four-wheel drive (4WD) vehicles provide the main means of access to the dry and sparsely settled sandy coastlines of Western Australia for ecotourists and other visitors alike. This has cre- ated an extensive network of tracks through dune and foreshore vegetation. Most previous studies of 4WD vehicle impacts have focused on local-scale impacts (Anders and Leather- man, 1987. Lonsdale and Lane, 1994; Kutiel et al, 2000) In areas such as these dry sand coastlines, however, the local impacts are of vegetation cover and destabilization of the sand surface. The crit ical issue is the aggregate impact at a regional scale, the proportion of the landscape where vegetation has been removed. For the narrow band of foreshore vegetation immediately above the high-tide mark, the best indicator of impact is the density of access points: the number of tracks that cut through foreshore veg etation, per kilometre of beach. For the band of dune vegetation behind the beach, the simplest indicator is the total length of track per kilometre of coastline, since all the tracks are of similar width. And the most effective way to quantify both beach access points and length of track is from aerial photographs. This paper, therefore, compares access point and track length statistics derived from airphoto coverage in 1965 and 1999, a period of 33 years.