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A navigation app that illuminates public land within privately held property

• 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  In many places, the land between high tide and low tide is public no matter what the beachfront property owner says. That doesn't stop them from making it very difficult for the public to access.
• djha-skin 4y ago
  I live in Utah, where 54% of the state is public land. San Juan County is 94% public land. 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.
  • shantaram07 4y ago
    .
    • shantaram07 4y ago
      Oh you meant “Bureau of Land Management”. My apologies for inferring it wrong.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      BLM Land has been a mainstay of the US for years and widely supported by both parties, especially republicans. https://www.blm.gov/ https://www.blm.gov/
      • shantaram07 4y ago
        Yes, I realised my lack of knowledge and creating an assumption there. Sorry.
        • bombcar 4y ago
          No worries! It’s a relatively common (and amusing) mistake.
      • seattle_spring 4y ago
        Hmm not so sure about that. Republicans are generally pissed that Utah has so much federal land. Their talking point is often explicitly aiming to grant it back to the state. Part of the reason they were so against Bears Ears and Grand Staircase was because it further pushed back what the state could do with that land. And please don’t kid yourself if you think they want the state to control it for preservation.
    • ghgdynb1 4y ago
      BLM means Bureau of Land Management
      • shantaram07 4y ago
        Yes, sorry for inferring it wrong.
  • bombcar 4y ago
    There’s a difference in kind between “you can drive to this plot of land the size of a smaller state but there are no roads in it” and “the only way to reach this land at all is via helicopter”.
    • Brian_K_White 4y ago
      The land owners in this case are even actually arguing that so much as waving your arm over their line violates their air space, so even a helecopter is no good. Which makes me wonder why I don't immediately go buy a $5000 plot somewhere and sue all the airlines for millions. edit - ok actually a helecopter is good, see several other comments
  • yummypaint 4y ago
    It's a good thing that there aren't roads in every conceivable place they could be built. My favorite places on public land are still in good shape because they take planning and effort to reach, and are only accessible on foot.
  • LorenPechtel 4y ago
    As I hiker I definitely disagree with the notion that no roads = no access. I've been plenty of places you could not construct a road without some pretty hefty engineering. 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.
    • CWuestefeld 4y ago
      > I'd say the owner of the land that land-locks it gets to within reason decide the route that is permitted 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)
  • Turing_Machine 4y ago
    Same in here Alaska, except far more so and without the gravel roads. Air or water travel is the only practical way to reach most of the state. Sometimes foot, snow machine or dog sled are feasible for some areas, at some seasons of the year.
• rcarr 4y ago
  Someone with big balls should set up a company that flies people in and out of these areas by helicopter. Would probably make a fortune from libertarians
  • theideaofcoffee 4y ago
    I hesitate to engage with this comment, but this 'method' is the same that was used by the hunters with the ladder. The sticking point is that, sure, they're not stepping foot in the corner-adjacent lots, but they are still crossing into the property via the air. This would be the same issue with the helicopter. 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.
    • bananapear 4y ago
      > but they are still crossing into the property via the air. This would be the same issue with the helicopter. Surely there is some altitude at which that doesn't apply? Otherwise there'd be problems with commercial jets too?
      • empyrrhicist 4y ago
        Not sure about ladders, but the post you're replying to is spouting complete nonsense wrt aircraft.
    • filleokus 4y ago
      I guess there must be some upper limit, otherwise normal commercial air traffic at 10k meter / 30k feet would be in serious trouble. 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.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ulrashida 4y ago
  It'd be interesting to know what tech stack OnX is using to achieve their outcomes. Looks pretty slick!
  • myself248 4y ago
    You might also be interested in Regrid, https://regrid.com/ https://regrid.com/ 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.
    • heliodor 4y ago
      Awesome website! What kind of use cases are there for using this data in bulk?
• metadat 4y ago
  https://archive.today/FC4AJ https://archive.today/FC4AJ
• mediascreen 4y ago
  As someone who has grown up with "Freedom to roam"[0] laws, it seems so weird that you would need to keep track of who owns the land where you are hiking. (To be fair you can't just hunt wherever you want in Sweden either.) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam#Sweden
  • srcreigh 4y ago
    Interesting. In Sweden people can roam with some restrictions. In particular they can't go close to someone's house (up to 70m). Also, in Sweden, they wanted to protect the right to walk along a shoreline, so due to the other rule they stopped allowing houses to be built closer than 100m to the shoreline.
    • null_object 4y ago
      > Also, in Sweden, they wanted to protect the right to walk along a shoreline, so due to the other rule they stopped allowing houses to be built closer than 100m to the shoreline 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.
      • ASalazarMX 4y ago
        Money tends to bend the laws. Mexico also has freedom to roam the shoreline, but rich people keep trying to reserve their beach fronts, and in many cases they succeed. Ironically, hotels have a harder time doing the same.
  • progre 4y ago
    In fact, hunting rights (leased or as land owner) supersedes the "freedom to roam" rights. So a hunting party is fully within their rights to ask you to leave.
• Scaevolus 4y ago
  A number of European countries have "freedom to roam". It would be nice if America had an equivalent, but given how lobbying works that seems impossible at this point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam
  • bergenty 4y ago
    I wouldn’t want that in the US. We have more than enough national public land where people are free to roam. The last thing I want is some random camping in my backyard. We are a very individualistic people, I don’t want people in my little nation state.
    • teddyh 4y ago
      > The last thing I want is some random camping in my backyard. FUD. Freedom to Roam laws only allow camping a fair distance away from inhabited buildings.
      • torstenvl 4y ago
        • teddyh 4y ago
          No, what’s “ugly behavior” is posting FUD. > The vast majority of people don't have inhabited buildings in their back yards. If a building is uninhabited, the yard attached to it is hardly “my backyard”, as ‘bergenty’ wrote.
          • torstenvl 4y ago
            • teddyh 4y ago
              Sorry, but characterizing Freedom to Roam as allowing people “camping in my backyard” is indeed FUD. Words like “my backyard” have a reasonable definition, and you can’t just redefine them at will (i.e. redefine “my backyard” to mean “my whole property”) to make the statement technically true.
• zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
  This is insane. Nobody should be allowed to block access like that. The land owner was harassing these men while they were on public land and is continuing to harass them using a court. The landowner should be in prison.
  • jacob019 4y ago
    Prison--no... we do too much of that in this country already. He should be defeated though.
    • zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
      Nah. Rich people who use hired goons and courts to harass people should be in prison.
      • WarOnPrivacy 4y ago
        I would guess the parent is on-board with proportional harm done for wealth-based thuggery - and that that can be achieved without putting prison on the table. The potential principle here is that our current version of prison is too inhumane to be a thoughtless, automatic goto.
    • f0000 4y ago
      Yeah, we should only imprison the poor not white collar criminals they're too similar to ourselves.
      • phpisthebest 4y ago
        who about we do not imprison either, only using prison to 1. Separate violent people from society 2. Separate people who through a long pattern of behavior have proven they cant or are unwilling the follow the laws of civil society Economic status should not be a factor
        • Brian_K_White 4y ago
• abruzzi 4y ago
  this is very common in the west. Its one of several ways to "own" more property than you paid for. If your property completely encloses 1000 acres of public land, that land is as good as yours (with the exception of building things, but many of the property owners in these cases are taking people hunting on the land, so no permanant structures would be built anyway.) Another common thing is land leases. I don't know how many ranches I've seen for sale around here (NM) that state something like 1000 acres, but when you look closer, its 200 acres, with a BLM lease on the other 800 acres. That doesn't grant them exclusive use of the land (to the best of my knowledge), but they frequently act like it does--placing "no tresspassing" signs, confronting people, arguing its their land. (and while you are paying for those leases, it is CHEAP. something like $2 per acre per year.
  • Wildgameeater06 4y ago
    I personally think this is the case in most remote areas bordered by private land as the land owners selll sub leases to big hunting companies and the hunting companies make profit off of public land as it is like a lot of areas here in Oregon
  • luckylion 4y ago
    If it doesn't grant them exclusive rights, and they can't e.g. put up "no trespassing" signs, wouldn't that be a crime because they are claiming ownership, and thereby claiming that the state does not have ownership? Have you ever reported one of them to see what happens?
    • GavinMcG 4y ago
      What crime would it be? It might be dishonest and antisocial but those things usually aren’t criminal on their own.
    • phpisthebest 4y ago
      It is only a crime if police and prosecutors are willing to enforce it. 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)
• JKCalhoun 4y ago
  > Mr. Eshelman ... Discussing the case in an email statement to The Wall Street Journal this month, he said “forcible trespass” was a safety issue and could affect the property value. Clearly the property, trying to hem in public land, was over-valued.
• ryanblakeley 4y ago
  Corner crossing seems like something that could be solved by saying "where two corners meet there must be an easement xx meters wide to allow the public to cross". I can't imagine any reason why the private landowner should be allowed to put up fencing and signs that block the corner. 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.
  • lazide 4y ago
    Typically that happens when it’s needed, and then (unless someone tries to stop it), it becomes a defacto easement after awhile. 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)
  • droopyEyelids 4y ago
    > I can't imagine any reason why the private landowner should be allowed to put up fencing and signs that block the corner. 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
  • balderdash 4y ago
    Not disagreeing with the sentiment expressed here, but from a PURELY theoretical standpoint, there is no actual space to pass through a corner without trespassing on the two adjacent plots of land
• sosodev 4y ago
  Looking around my city in the onX app makes me really sad. So many historic trails have been sold to investors and are now being blocked/developed…
• motohagiography 4y ago
  The kicker in the article that "nobody is going to grant access out of the goodness of their heart," is absolutely untrue. There are fox hunts and hikes in my area where landowners grant access for this reason. What has done the most harm is insurance and the risk of liability and litigation from people injuring themselves on your land, and that has made landowners become very aggressive about trespassers, as it just takes one "slippin' jimmy" scammer (like the many auto insurance collision scammers already out there) to put their home at risk and cost them a significant settlement. That liability makes any trespassing at all a present and reckless threat against your home. 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.
  • pas 4y ago
    Wait. How is anyone liable if someone slips & trips while trespassing? 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.
    • theptip 4y ago
• irrational 4y ago
  My backyard borders on about 1/2 acre of green space. Technically it is public land, but it is inaccessible unless you cross my property or parachute in. The yard is fenced on all sides (to keep our golden retriever in), except the green space side. So, someone would have to come over the fence. I wonder how much pubic land like this probably isn’t included in the app mentioned in the article.
• Onanymous 4y ago
  Blocking access to public land is definitely bad. But am I the only one who's first reaction is "Fuck hunters" anyway?
  • phpisthebest 4y ago
    >But am I the only one who's first reaction is "Fuck hunters" anyway? 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.
• attah_ 4y ago
  What an amazingly petty thing to put signs like that.
• exabrial 4y ago
  Really shortsided position by the land owner, and I have no doubt he’ll end up with far less rights than he started by raking people over the coals. 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.
  • dkokelley 4y ago
    Agreed that squeezing too hard will probably backfire. I don’t agree that encouraging or facilitating the crossing is a win-win. 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?
  • shmageggy 4y ago
    > 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. But that's not what this person wants. He wants to maintain exclusive access to land that isn't his.
  • exhilaration 4y ago
    The best part is that he couldn't even convince a local jury!
• crtified 4y ago
  In countries which already have advanced, digital, unified land record systems, "illuminating public land" would be a relatively simple database instruction.
• saagarjha 4y ago
  Does anyone know if I could go look up ownership of parcels of land in my city? I don’t really need a hiking map, I was just wondering if there was a government database or something where I could look up who owned what.
  • Aachen 4y ago
    If you're in Germany, ALKIS I think shows what you're looking for. If in the Netherlands, check PDOK. 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.
    • saagarjha 4y ago
      Indian-American living in the Bay Area, I used Regrid as suggested by another commenter.
  • daydream 4y ago
    In the US this tends to be done at the city or county level, as far as I know. In my state each city has their own land parcel database that they make available. That said, this commenter pointed to https://regrid.com 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755133. Regrid looks great and might work for you.
    • saagarjha 4y ago
      Ah, yes, this is pretty close to what I needed. I across referenced it with my county's parcel survey :)
• Wildgameeater06 4y ago
  The public should have access through private land to get to public land this whole thing with land ownership making money off of public land is a crock and if that’s the case the public should change the land owners for taking animals off that public land that have no access to the public