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Earlier quoted context omitted.
7.5 hours from Strasbourg to Perpignan via train. 9 hours via car at an average of 100kmh. So the train is approximately freeway speed.
Lille (Northern France) to Marseille (Southern France) - 1000Km 10 hours via car at highway speed - 5 hours with train For long distances you'll be using the TGV (300km/h) if you need to go to smaller cities the trains will go roughly at highway speed
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The owner must not have thought it through then, because most tourists will chug on straight through their field. Having a marked path is to their own benefit if they have the (mis?)fortune of living on the way to a landmark. I remember a similar case on Malta, where I went up a hill to get a nice view from a cave, recommended to me as part of the tourist route. The whole access to the cave lies across private proper…
Some landowners I suspect hope that if they let the public footpath get poorly maintained and poorly marked, walkers will tell their friends its a bad walk, easy to get lost, and fewer will try to walk it. That if people can't identify the legal path across a field, they won't cross at all for fear of breaking the law. Needless to say, this doesn't work well on the stubborn, hardy types who'll spend hours ascending h…
The local farmers generally detest ramblers, as it’s not unusual to find picnic leftovers, balloons, condoms, whatever, in a field with livestock, so I can understand their desire to discourage walkers. Heck, where I live most of the time in the wilds of Portugal, I initially had no reservations about people using our land to access the river - until they started leaving trash and faeces around the place. Now we have no trespassing signs, which saddens me, but I’ve picked up my last pile of shit and toilet paper.
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I visited Ireland this year (+- the Wild Atlantic Way), we considered biking but I'm happy we eventually decided to hike/hitchhike/take buses cause Ireland is not designed for walking/biking. Everything's fenced, roads have crazy high speed limits for their width, there's no pavements outside cities, even forests are banned most of the time. Hitchhiking on the other hand was great - we waited for more than 15 minutes…
I wouldn't necessarily say that's true for cycling. You just need to choose your routes carefully - follow the minor roads, not the major ones you'd use in a car. I've had some lovely days cycling quiet country lanes in Ireland. Same applies in the UK, though there are some areas (principally the Home Counties) where it's difficult to find a road that isn't infested with speeding Audis.
This is the issue, though. Over here, in France, secondary roads (smaller "départementales", roads you wouldn't take when looking for the fastest route from A to B when neither is directly on that road) are basically rally circuits.
Aside from a few usual suspects, the police don't really patrol them. I know many such roads where I've never seen a single cop after some two decades of riding in nice weather. And, at least around Paris, they're in good enough shape to allow speeding comfortably, but they're barely wider than a single Audi.
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Health Insurance companies will follow-up with determining if the property/land owner is responsible for the accident and try to sue. Months after ER treatment, I've had to respond that my child's cycling accident on a camp site was not because of the camp site owner's site maintenance. So it's not necessarily the victim who sues, but the victims' insurer.
I'm honestly skeptical that's a common thing however. I've certainly never encountered such a thing and, while I've seen a few cases such as yours mentioned online, it's not something I've ever heard from anyone I know.
The absence of this, at least in the US, is that there's essentially no country side properly understood. A bucolic permeable area that a city person can integrate in their daily life. The only way to enjoy the outdoors in America is as an activity. Drive there, park there. Do your thing. Come back. There's no osmosis or liminal space between urban and wilderness. It's either mechanized space for cars, or fenced off…
My examples would be communities situated near or around State/National parks. There is very much a just walk around in the integrated nature sort of feel there.
Specific example towns:
Keene Valley, NY Joshua Tree, California
To a lesser extent in the bay area east, and North along where the towns butt up against parks, and accessible areas.
Additionally I've found that towns/cities which have a major university that has open access for the public typically has the ability to wander and "lose yourself" feeling Berkley in CA has this feeling for me.
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Lille (Northern France) to Marseille (Southern France) - 1000Km 10 hours via car at highway speed - 5 hours with train For long distances you'll be using the TGV (300km/h) if you need to go to smaller cities the trains will go roughly at highway speed
What percentage of cities in Europe have TGV lines?
But, just about every major and secondary city in the EU has high speed rail service. As you move into central and Eastern Europe, the speeds drop quite a bit, but are still faster than anything Amtrak offers (except the short section of Acela line that can actually go fast).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/Hi...
The absence of this, at least in the US, is that there's essentially no country side properly understood. A bucolic permeable area that a city person can integrate in their daily life. The only way to enjoy the outdoors in America is as an activity. Drive there, park there. Do your thing. Come back. There's no osmosis or liminal space between urban and wilderness. It's either mechanized space for cars, or fenced off…
There are a few places around the US where I feel like this idea generally doesn't hold up, However I totally understand what you mean and it is the truth for many people living in the US. My examples would be communities situated near or around State/National parks. There is very much a just walk around in the integrated nature sort of feel there. Specific example towns: Keene Valley, NY Joshua Tree, California To a…
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I think Europeans may not really get how big some of these places are until they experience it first hand - it can easily take 9 hours at freeway speed to drive from one corner of WA state to the other (Blaine to Walla Walla), and that's if you stick to the freeways and highest possible speed highways, keep cruise control on at 115-120 km/h wherever possible, and take an absolute bare minimum of stops for gas and res…
> I think Europeans may not really get how big some of these places are until they experience it first hand Conversely, I think most Americans don't get how big the UK is, or how much longer it will take to get around than you think. Look at a map of Scotland. If you start at Glasgow on the west coast about a third of the way up, and drive to Scrabster, the northern end of the A9, that will take you at least 9 hours…
Driving time in Scotland is largely due to road size/design, not absolute distance. Once you get north of the Glasgow/Sterling/Edinburgh zone, you have a few “major” dual carriage ways and a lot of smaller roads. And the Highlands and Hebrides have single track, so if you’re going to a small coastal village or similar, you might be stopping every few miles to let somebody by in the other direction.
“You have to respect the interests of other people, care for the environment and take responsibility for your own actions.” My experience is the (few) individuals that struggle with this (leaving litter, leaving gates open, trampling crops, letting dogs into animal pastures, interfering with other peoples recreation) really do spoil it for everyone and irreparably damages relations with landowners
Out of interest, where are you commenting on? I agree it's true there's always a risk of these "tragedy of the commons" style issues with bad individuals, but this kind of access is a fairly long established tradition in Scotland and it seems to work reasonably well (although other commenters have mentioned a few exceptions where by-laws were put in place for trouble spots, but thankfully those are targeted in locati…
https://gailantheabrown.com/2021/08/12/poo-potholes-and-park...
The absence of this, at least in the US, is that there's essentially no country side properly understood. A bucolic permeable area that a city person can integrate in their daily life. The only way to enjoy the outdoors in America is as an activity. Drive there, park there. Do your thing. Come back. There's no osmosis or liminal space between urban and wilderness. It's either mechanized space for cars, or fenced off…
Granted, you do see fences to keep vehicles out, but that might be an artifact of our car-centric culture: if a path looks arguably driveable, eventually someone will try to drive it, regardless of whether or not they can get the vehicle out.
