In cases where the only way to access a parcel of public land is through private land then an easement should be created. If a road or trail can't be built for whatever reason then a sign with an arrow should be the rule.
A lot of land in the US is newly settled (by European standards) especially anything other west, so those kinds of things haven’t risen to the level of official standards. The basic ‘if it’s your property, you can do what you want, including people off of it’ is still mostly true, though it is getting more and more ‘supplemented’ by others rights over time (cough zoning, HOAs, etc)
A legally valid reason would be like "the wealthy elect lawmakers that write laws in the interest of the wealthy." That's how the USA works
It's cool because you got just a few hours south of the Wasatch Front, where 92% of Utahns live, on state route 29, and you see beautiful vistas of practically untouched territory.
The truth is public land is generally unreachable because there are no roads out there. Sure there are lots of roads into BLM land but there's just lots and lots of BLM land and they can't build roads into all of it on their current budget. Besides, usually the roads are gravel and of questionable maintenance.
And note that this article is about a case where there were no roads but the hunters were there anyway. I'm definitely on the side of the corner-crossers, you don't get to control public land by land-locking it. I'd say the owner of the land that land-locks it gets to within reason decide the route that is permitted, but they have to grant it. And I would say that any corner like this should automatically become shared access to both owners of the corner (in this case one of those owners is public, but I would apply the same standard if both were private), they can move anything between their properties so long as they minimize the intrusion and neither can do anything to hinder the other's ability to do so.
Locally, we have an interesting hiking area that's been a matter of dispute for many years and it isn't even due to a hostile land owner. There is private land with an old mine inside a national recreation area here. Unfortunately, it cuts the only way you can reach a canyon without encountering terrain obstacles. Reportedly, somebody's car got damaged while parked there, their insurance company tried to go after the landowner and the landowner's insurance company responded by requiring him to keep people off the land (he hadn't cared about us hikers, our passage did not harm him.) There is also the issue of a couple of mineshafts that idiots (the timbers do not look safe to me!) like to explore. Some states have gone partway towards addressing this--exempting the landowner from liability for any natural hazards (hey, nature doesn't come OSHA-sanitized, us backcountry guys know we need to make our own safety evaluation of the situation!), but this doesn't deal with the issue of old mineshafts. I'd like to see it go farther, exempt the landowner for all natural or old hazards, they're only liable if they create a hazard.
Suppose that the public land is sandwiched between two private owners. Which of those private owners must grant the access?
Worse, suppose that that chunk in the middle wasn't originally public land, but is later purchased by the state. At that point, the previous owners - having done nothing on their own - are suddenly encumbered with a right-of-way across their land, decreasing their value. This sounds like a taking to me, and thus subject to the 5th Amendment. (IANAL)
edit - ok actually a helecopter is good, see several other comments
Sadly today too much of the law is political, both left and right, with police and prosecutors choosing what laws they want to enforce, when, and on who (i.e picking people or groups they dislike)
Even with a large staff of park rangers and a budget for trail maintenance, trash bins, toilet facilities and informational signs about "leave no trace" ethics, it's still hard to minimize the damage tourists do in parks. And even within parks, we don't let people freely roam, we ask them to stay to trails to prevent erosion and we shut down areas seasonally to protect critical nesting, feeding or migration paths. To ask private citizens to deal with such damage to their property is unfair and unreasonable.
Further, the average city dweller has no ability to assess what land is safe for them to hike on in America. Again, for parks we have dedicated staff to put up signs and set clear rules about closures and access, but agricultural lands are far more complex. What looks like "unused" land may be grazing for cattle, flowers for bees or habit for wildlife (whether for conservation or hunting). It may have been recently sprayed with chemicals which are harmful if humans come into contact with them or it may have recently been planted and footsteps will trample early crops.
"Freedom to roam" is like suggesting that the solution to homelessness is to just let homeless people choose to sleep on anyone's couch who wasn't using it. The millions of acres of managed public lands in the US, which can have appropriate usage policies depending on environmental impact, historical significance, number of visitors, etc and which can be properly managed for the long-term balance of many diverse stakeholders needs is a far better system.
Surrounding public land by privately held land, with no rights for the public to freely access it is just not right. It essentially becomes the domain of the land owner that controls access, which then becomes a form of market intervention by the government.
This is often a direct subsidisation of a private enterprise and should be opposed by the left because it denies equality and freedom of movement to the people that own the land. It should be opposed by the right as government intervention and interference. It only benefits the individual landowner.
Of course, this issue is magnified by the colonial concept of land ownership and ignores any preceding title or use of the land. This also prevents traditional owners from accessing sites of significance.
This is not a Nordic idea. Ideas similar the right to roam built many of the economies of new world countries. Cowboys and cattle drives in the US, Drovers in Australia relied on the free movement of men and stock over public and private land.
Finally, the land belongs to the people. Laws exist in many jurisdictions for governments to reclaim any land for any reason. Private ownership should be considered long term, but temporary. Denying access to something that the people own is undemocratic, unfair, and unnecessary. Access and maintenance shouldn’t be reduced to the cost of stewardship.
What is special about Nordic countries making it only (sort of) work there? All the issues you mentioned are issues faced in Nordic countries as well.
We got to Stockholm, looked at the train map, picked somewhere random, and headed off. When it got suitably rural, we got off. (My memory now is of that scene from Trainspotting where they go to the Scottish hills to recuperate.)
We walked a couple of miles down a road and found an idyllic patch of well-kept grass. Might have been a bowls green or something. We pitched our tents at the edge, respectful of the surface. Heated up a meal, had a tea, watched the stars. It was amazing.
The next morning some guy was on a ride-on mowing the grass. He gave us a friendly nod, we packed up, we left.
Naturally the rich and powerful have been claiming the shoreline along most of the coast around major towns in Sweden - this is especially true pretty much anywhere in the affluent suburbs around Stockholm, where house owners just extend their gardens down to the water.
As for freedom to roam - I’ve been walking around Södermanland the last few summers, and have met an amazingly few other Swedes hiking. Even during the pandemic I met more foreigners out on the paths. Swedes were safely ensconced in their cars.
In the US, a lot of the desire to keep people off private lands is liability driven (which is not mentioned in the article) e.g. someone decides to wander onto your land where you are building a house in the country, falls in a ditch at the construction site and sues you for their injuries while trespassing on your land…
someone fucking up on your property without your knowledge, and you can get in trouble. this was also when i learned about how home owner's insurance can be targeted. it was just one of those moments in life when the facade starts to crumble as childhood views start to give way to real world realities
I am not a lawyer, but I would guess that this might result in a small fee for not following building ordinances or something more serious if gross negligence was involved. People suing each other for millions is not really a thing in Sweden.
Public land is lovely until you have vagrancy problems as well. I live around conservation land near a major suburb and the number of loiterers, trespassers, and poachers you get is way more than you expect. When you are close to the city, the relative isolation becomes a real home invasion risk. Privacy and respect for property and boundaries is a very regional value, and attitudes against something as obvious as littering just aren't universal either. The corner crossing case in the article where there is some tendentiously legal loophole is really an example of people lacking respect for property and going where they explicitly aren't welcome. Nobody has a problem with people coming to appreciate nearby public land, but use and abuse of it without any value or contribution to the surrounding community is a problem. Instagram has become an utter cancer that way, where people drive into your driveway to take a picture, and then you get 10 others showing up because they want the same location. Someone who demonstrates that lack of respect for privacy and property should be incentivized to do so with whatever imposed cost is adequate, imo.
Being held liable for setting booby traps for thieves, sure, completely understandable. But ... injury while walking ... especially on land that wasn't prepared as a path/road? WTF
Is this some kind of black comedy bingo contest?
> attitudes against something as obvious as littering just aren't universal either. > Instagram has become an utter cancer that way
Yeah, no questions about those. Some people are just unimaginably selfish and inconsiderate egokings/queens.
https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/who-is-liable-if-a-trespas...
I don’t know about liability for injury to adults trespassing but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a thing in some jurisdictions.
I’d be fine with explicitly limiting liability in exchange for passing “right to roam” laws, the US is way to litigious.
This is not counting local, state and national parks and forests.
Why fix a problem that doesn't exist?
Some of the largest parks are comparable in size to European countries.
How much of that land is where people actually are? Most of that land you need to drive to.
A problem is that (at least some parts of) America has pretty absurd "stand your ground" laws (absurd from a EU POV).
Even in the EU countries which don't have freedom to roam laws it is most times safe and often rather inconsequential to trespass, as long as (very oversimplified) you don't climb any fences or similar and keep on the path. (I.e. you have only "accidentally" overlooked the sign pointing out it's a private path you are not allowed to take.)
Note that I strongly recommend reading/translating path signs, they might matter a lot. Similar keep on the path, not just for nature but because there might be unexpected natural and less natural dangers (like WW2 left overs, accidentally entering military training areas, flash flood risks, dangerous nature, etc.).
You're confusing "stand your ground" (wherein one can defend against an attacker regardless of where they are) and "castle doctrine" (wherein one can defend against an attacker if residing on one's property). It's the latter that's applicable in this case, but only if the person trespassing is also attacking the property owner.
Additionally, there is a very strong historical precedent for both in western (ie European) law, and especially for the latter.
To anyone living in a rural area or working in agriculture, conservation, timber/lumber, mining, ranching, hunting, etc, the idea of a finding a random stranger walking across their property would be as alarming as finding that stranger in their living room. The tourists may unintentionally cause damage, disrupt operations or create an unsafe condition even if they were well-meaning. And of course, many people will not be the ideal "leave no trace" expert and many will cause problems- they'll leave litter, they'll gather sticks for firewood, they'll clear areas for campsites, they'll walk on wet grass, they'll leave human waste, they'll leave fire rings with charred remains, they'll pick flowers or fruit, they'll take fossils, they'll carve their names in trees and paint on rocks, etc.
Ethically, if we're going to start taking away people's property rights, I'd rather we force vacant urban housing to be made available to rent before we start forcing farmers to clean up rogue campsites on their fallow fields.
FUD. Freedom to Roam laws only allow camping a fair distance away from inhabited buildings.
Story: A regional gov agency bought a large tract of land behind my home for conservation. A fireline was cut all around the edge of the tract and lined with a 4' wire fence that ran adjacent to our properties. Homeowners were unitedly happy the land wouldn't be developed but some were upset it was now available for public daytime use.
Two disgruntled neighbors in particular stand out. One was a new mom who was alone all day and was unsettled with folks hiking past her backyard. The other was a generally cantankerous old guy who felt his right of privacy ought to extend far into land that wasn't his.
Whenever my kids and I hiked the fireline, we made a point of venturing away from the alone-mom's property but didn't extend the same courtesy to the old guy. Though we had a right to walk any part of the tract we wanted, we found respecting alone-mom's concerns was worth the effort.
My moral here is that demanding every last nanometer of rights - while rejecting all notions of consideration - is usually too absolutist to be productive. When conflicting desires are in play, I feel consideration+efficiency leads to more workable agreements.
We revolted for a reason, many Americans seem to have forgotten those reasons in the centuries since, Europe has always been more authoritarian than the US, and they largely replaced monarch systems with more collectivist systems instead of adoption of more Individualist systems like the US did.
I prefer the Individualist system, the smallest minority is the individual, and individual rights are supreme over collective or group rights.
But I think the different culture of America is a really good practical reason against improving access for the public. Guns alone would make it risky.
Aristocrats couldn't accept admitting representatives elected by the merely rich, rather than only aristocrats, since that would obviously be a large step toward the end of aristocratic political privilege, while most British citizens in positions of political power in the colonies were rich but were not aristocrats, so wouldn't accept representation that curtailed the franchise and/or restricted office to aristocrats, as it was in Britain (American revolutionary leaders wanted a slightly larger franchise, as was the custom in the colonies, and without which they would suffer a great loss of power and probably wealth, since office is a great way to get richer, maybe even more-so then than now) and these positions were irreconcilable for reasons of individual interest on both sides?
[EDIT] I mean there were also propaganda reasons but if that hadn't been a factor the war very likely wouldn't have happened until/unless Britain tried to end slavery.
Pulling straight from Franklin Covey’s seven habits: think win-win. Simply allowing people to cross at the corner and encouraging them to do so by building a path works keeps them off his land and in public areas. Hell even charge them a reasonable fee for the crossing to keep it from becoming a free for all!
But the no compromise, ‘7 million airspace violation’ position will lose badly in the long term, even if he can convince if he can convince a few local juries for a few short sighted temporary wins. Worst case scenario is the federal government decides that there has to be land access and forces a road onto his private property. Now _that_ would suck.
But that's not what this person wants. He wants to maintain exclusive access to land that isn't his.
It’s likely that the landowners bought the plots strategically to get de facto “ownership” of the public land. Why buy all of the land when you can buy the moat around it?
They started as a Detroit-only grassroots effort called "Why don't we own this?", tracking property auctions and helping locals buy adjacent parcels when they came available.
But quickly they realized this data was powerful once it was easy to access. Which was no mean feat -- every locality has their own terrible way to store parcel data, it seems, and it's a ton of work to gather and unify it. But once they've done that work, they can charge a bit to access it in scriptable and exportable ways, but the browser interface remains free.
Personally I think the government should just fund the operation and make all the access free, because this is fundamentally everyone's data, and unifying it should be the government's job. But in the meantime, I've never found myself needing more than the free access.
What kind of use cases are there for using this data in bulk?
Clearly the property, trying to hem in public land, was over-valued.
Consider a property line not just a line on the ground, but an invisible wall extending from that line on the ground up toward the sky. That's the issue here, is that the hunters are disturbing the 'air rights' of the adjacent properties by crossing that invisible wall, and not just by stepping physically onto the property. Using a helicopter wouldn't be much of a loophole if the air rights are concerned, I think.
Edit: after comments, yes, duh, it doesn’t extend infinitely and there’s the aspect of reasonable use, c’mon, why do people need their hand held through everything. Flying a helicopter over another property at 100’ is different than 2000’. Talk to the FAA.
In the US there is not a specific limit, but the principle is “your airspace rights extend as far as could reasonably be used in connection with the property.”[0]
It also depends on frequency of overflight. A small plane landing at a nearby rural airport once a week is treated differently than swarms of drones flying at the same altitude all day every day.
So maybe a few hundred feet, maaaaybe 5000 feet if your property is a helipad. But not infinite.
[0] https://aviation.uslegal.com/ownership-of-airspace-over-prop...
Even the national park service, which tries to restrict aircraft as much as possible, can only regulate in this way (and to prevent harassing wildlife).
I have a commercial drone license.
Surely there is some altitude at which that doesn't apply? Otherwise there'd be problems with commercial jets too?
That cites another FAR, 91.119: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/91.119 which lays out the general rules for fixed wing traffic and some exceptions for helicopters.
Over most unpopulated areas, it’s 500’ from surface, structures, vehicles, or people, unless lower is needed for takeoff and landing.
As long as the public land is large enough that you can land the helicopter far enough away from the private property to not expose yourself to other problems (some kind of noise limit maybe?), it seems like it should be doable right?
Fly over the property at 3000 feet and land on public land.
That said, this commenter pointed to https://regrid.com as a company that aggregates all this local data and provides a nationwide parcel map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755133.
Regrid looks great and might work for you.
Your username somehow gives me an Indian vibe though, so not sure if this was helpful. Might help to specify which city or area you're asking after.
Do the rich almost always avoid prison: yes
Maybe if we applied laws equally and actually jailed rich people who committed crimes instead of giving them fines/slaps on the wrist we'd have a few more powerful advocates for prison reform. And I'm not talking about sending them to white collar prisons [0], it's absurd how there are 2 sets of justice in the country.
Yes? Anyone that says that is clearly ignorant of the need for hunting in maintaining environmental balance.
Unless of-course we want to bring back natural predators and have the problem of children, pets, and live stock being attacked.
