My ideal "right to roam" laws would be
1) you have the right to pass through any piece of land
2) you have to stay x amount of meters away from a house/building/etc
3) you have the right to camp for one night in a spot and you can't have a tent pitched until one hour before sunset and it must be down by one hour after sunrise. There should probably be an even further minimum distance from a house compared to the distance set for just passing by.
4) no fires / pack it in, pack it out / etc
There's a bunch of places in Europe now that have a no camping policy, but allow (or tolerate) "bivouacking", which originally meant sleeping on the ground without a shelter but now kind of includes small tents. I think it's the ideal tradeoff, it still allows long distance backpackers to do their thing while discouraging the "party camping" crowds.
>you have the right to camp for one night in a spot and you can't have a tent pitched until one hour before sunset and it must be down by one hour after sunrise.
If you have land in a desirable location, I fear your at best one tiktok away from people coming to your property each night to camp.
I think right to roam is an interesting idea, but the camping part should probably just be left out, or the fine minimal enough where if you made a best effort to stay out of sight and out of the way (as you should) no one would care. And if you got 'caught' you don't head to prison.
That's really not far off Scotland's "responsible access" (the proper term for the 'right to roam'). It's just more fleshed out.
The Outdoor Access Code contains such gems as "You only have access rights if you exercise them responsibly", which I love - it's the closest I've ever seen to "don't be a dick" being codified. But also such details as in crop fields you only have access to the margins, fields with animals, bringing dogs, etc.
But they do have "land on which there is a house [..] and sufficient adjacent land to enable those living there to have reasonable measures of privacy and to ensure that their enjoyment of the house [..] is not unreasonably disturbed". Which isn't "x metres", but is again wonderfully close to "don't be a dick".
So would this ideal legal framework extend to the suburbs? Do I get to roam through people's backyards? Am I allowed to hop over fences so long as I stay X meters away from buildings? How big does a property have to be before I can pitch my tent in the middle of someone's lawn? No matter what the number, 10m, 25m, 100m, I can probably find a nice neighborhood on google maps full of lawns big enough to become my next campsite.
I haven't really thought it through but off the top of my head 250m from a house just passing by seems reasonable, and maybe something like 750-1000m for biouvacking? No one (who wants the right to roam in the wilderness) desires to roam around the suburbs, and having some reasonable limits like 250m/1000m would prevent people from doing that. It would prevent people from entering tracts of land that are even a few acres in size. When I think "the right to roam" I am thinking about places with vast tracts of wilderness. Think some "ranches" in the American West, though could be tens of thousands of acres of land not really used for much besides grazing cattle. No one advocating for the right to roam wants to camp in your backyard.
The policy needs to be reasonable, unless you want home owners taking matters in their own hands (you don't).
Policy or not, seeing a steady stream of strangers "roam" through your property next to your (vulnerable) family members will generally do more harm than good.
Also, how would you deal with unintended property damage?
> Am I allowed to hop over fences so long as I stay X meters away from buildings?
A reasonable policy would probably specify at least 50-100 meters from buildings, which would outlaw roaming in suburbia.
There is no reasonable policy, not in the US. No matter what number is picked, homeowners will install anything from doll houses to razor wire to prevent their back lot becoming the next homeless encampment.
As a child I routinely cut through neighbors' yards in a suburban area. It's not reasonable to deny this sort of passage to anyone. IMO it's reasonable that there be footpaths which allow general passage between buildings.
There's a bunch of places in Europe now that have a no camping policy, but allow (or tolerate) "bivouacking", which originally meant sleeping on the ground without a shelter but now kind of includes small tents. I think it's the ideal tradeoff, it still allows long distance backpackers to do their thing while discouraging the "party camping" crowds.