In America we don’t have any sort of “right to roam” law, sadly. If you want to feel even more smug and mock my country, wait until you watch this: youtu.be/yBrtWXBhuuo
In the west there is a grid pattern of land like a checker board. Like this:
X O X O O X ? X X ? X O O X O X
The Xs are private property and you cannot access them. The Os are public property. The ?s in the middle are public property, but how do you get to them? The only way is by crossing through a corner. Obviously, the private land owners would prefer to view the public land as an extension of their private land so they believe that corner crossing should be illegal because it passes through their property. (Even if you don’t step on it you have to cross through their airspace so to speak.) Meanwhile, everyone else says, “hey, you can’t just double your land like this! Let me have access to the public land! What the hell do you mean airspace? I’m not a plane! I’m a person! And I didn’t step on your property!”
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
We have plenty of places like that here as well. The places where you have to pay to park are generally very popular and the fee is largely used to reduce how many go (i.e. reduce destruction) and fund maintenance and cleanup efforts.
In my area, the only places that charge are state and national parks, and not even all of them. I have dozens of hiking trails within a few miles of me without any parking fees, and there’s a massive federally owned swath of land nearby also with no parking fees.
If you go to the handful of extremely popular parks, you’ll pay a fee (and you can get an inexpensive yearly pass if you want), but if you go to literally anywhere else (dozens if not hundreds within 50 miles or so), there’s no fee. So Grand Canyon or Yellowstone = fee, local falls or BLM land (federally owned, but not a “national park”) are free.
Dasus@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
I just don’t understand how you can “fee” Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon. Those places are huge.
You have a booth on every road?
I don’t believe there’s a single place like that in Finland, what with our everymans rights
Death_Equity@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Yellowstone has limited access by road, but you could hike into it.
The Grand Canyon has visitor’s centers and a few established areas with infrastructure for various activities, but you could hike to it, but getting into the canyon is another matter.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
Yup, for Yellowstone, that’s 3 entrances, so three sets of booths. It’s largely to cut down on traffic (traffic gets really bad as-is) and maintain the infrastructure.
The only reason you’d go to any of the entrances is to visit the park, there are no through roads or anything, and it’s like an hour or two from the major highways, and several hours from a city larger than 10k people (aside from the tourism towns just outside the park). And the traffic to get into the park is backed up for an hour in the morning for people looking to get lucky with extra passes (there’s a maximum capacity).
Dasus@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
It’s genuinely hard to imagine how large America is.
And Finland isn’t one of the tiny Central-European countries.
Driving from Fresno to Yellowstone is pretty much the distance it is to drive from where I live (Southern end of Finland) to the Northern end of Finland.
But yeah at the Northern end in Lapland it starts getting more like that, only a few roads going to the larger national parks. Here in the South you can just go around anything really, there’s backroads and footpaths everywhere. Like no matter how deep in the woods I go, I’d feel awkward taking a shit, since there’s always some dogwalkers to be met.
This makes me want to go hiking up North.