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Comment by cscurmudgeon | Hacker News Reader

In practice it doesn't matter at all, just BLM (Bureau of Land Management) alone owns 387,500 sq mi of public land. For comparison, Scotland, is 30,090 sq mi in size .

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.

https://mapfight.xyz/map/yellowstone/

https://mapfight.xyz/map/death.valley/

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Having to drive to a place to hike rather than just being able to go across the areas around you is annoying.

Exactly, the difference between unconnected wild areas (public access wise) and connected wild areas is massive. The landscape in large parts of the US is totally fenced in and splintered in a way that even if there is lots of public access it isn't effectively connected in a way that people can actually utilize it.

It’s the US, you’re going to have to drive to it anyway because it’s 500 miles away.

There are tons of hiking places that are walkable from most US city centers. Most US cities have large parks.

Unless European cities are smack in the middle of nature, I think they also have same issue.

If you read TFA, the issue is access to said land.

Because just giving out land numbers is pretty useless?

How much of that land is where people actually are? Most of that land you need to drive to.

If you want to be where people are, you can just be home. Isn't the point of hiking and camping being away from other people? ;)

You misunderstand. The point is that people are only able/willing to travel a certain distance from where they live to use public land. Public land that's very far way from population centres is not useful (for public access purposes) regardless of how much of it there is.

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