The longest straight line in Great Britain without crossing a public road | Hacker News Reader

The longest straight line in Great Britain without crossing a public road

statsmapsnpix.com

154 pointssamwillis124 comments

Not entirely clear from the article, but it looks like it might be a "straight" line on a Mercator-projected map, in other words, a rhumb line[1]. So that technically doesn't answer the question "what (and where) is the longest distance you can walk in a straight line [...]??" When you are walking in reference to a compass (let's simplify and assume it references True North), you are actually making a gradual turn to stay aligned with your angle to the meridians. Especially at high latitudes like in Great Britain. Instead, he should be looking for the longest Great Circle[2] line from point to point, which may, in reality, be in a very similar location because for short distances, great circles often line up very closely with rhumblines.

The author is a founder of a mapping company, so he very likely knows this, and the article is aimed at a more layman audience who likes to play around with Google Maps and such.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhumb_line

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_circle

If it were to get technical enough to differentiate between rhumb and great circle, then maybe it should factor in elevation changes too.

If you include elevation then you have to include tolerance for deviation. I live in an old house, so I can't even walk across the room without a vertical deviation of some sort :)

Edit: My point here is that if you try to plot a literal straight line through 3D space, it will be necessary to allow some amount of deviation in one axis. Else your longest 3D line will be the distance between your first two points.

He does: 75.9km on the map, 77.0km when accounting for elevation. With the caveat: "Well, it's never as much as I'd think and it depends upon the accuracy of your terrain model"

That number surprised me, but because of how much extra it was rather than how little extra -- I always assume it's negligable, but in this case was over 1%

I also agree it seems like a lot. If there was 3000m of elevation gain and 3000m of elevation loss, I would only expect a couple or hundred extra meters of distance walked. 77.23 ≈ sqrt(77^2+(3+3)^2).

Reading total elevation gain/loss from his graph it hard but 3000m up and down seems about right.

The average gradient of Scotland is 19.3%.

Then it becomes a coastline problem, with different answers depending on the resolution of your elevation data.

Great video on this from Matt Parker (focusing on area in this case): https://youtu.be/PtKhbbcc1Rc

Mercator maps are conformal, which means that over small distances, shapes are preserved, though you do have to correctly adjust the distance scale. So how much does that matter over 76 km, would the bend in the line even be visible?

Yea, admittedly at these distances (<100km) the difference will be very small unless at extreme latitudes.

Looks like the points are at approximately N57°18.280', W3°55.948' -> N56°54.152', W4°56.664' if anyone wants to do the math. My guess is the rhumb line and GC route differ by no more than a few meters.

I was hoping the article would go more into how they searched the data and found the points. An exhaustive search of all points in the U.K. would obviously be computationally prohibitive. Maybe create millions of polygons where the edges are roads, and sort them by area to reduce the search space? From the article's text it looks like he "eyeballed" the map to find empty areas to focus on, which is unsatisfying :)

I get a bit over 200 metres from the following R code. (Edit: I forgot how to format code for HM, sorry.)

    library(oce)
    lat <- c(57+18.280/60, 56+54.152/60)
    lon <- -c(3+55.948/60, 4+56.664/60)
    m <- lm(lat ~ lon)
    # Find points along a great-circle route
    gc <- oce::geodGc(lon, lat, 0.001)
    # 'scale' is distance associated with 1 degree latitude shift
    scale <- geodDist(mean(lon), mean(lat), mean(lon), mean(lat)+1)
    # 'e' is latitude shift from great-circle route to 'straight' line route
    e <- scale\*sapply(seq_along(gc$longitude),
        function(i)
            gc$latitude[i] - predict(m, data.frame(lon=gc$longitude[i])))
    plot(gc$longitude, e, type="l",
         xlab="Longitude [degE]",  ylab="Distance error [km]", col=2)
    max(e)

I’m not familiar with R, but the lm(…) line looks like it’s linearly interpolating the latitude and longitude. However, that’s not what straight lines in a Mercator projection are. You might be confusing it with the cylindrical projection.

The Mercator projection stretches things away from the equator vertically to compensate the horizontal stretching, in order to preserve local shapes. This makes it a bit better for these kinds of local measurements than one might think at first glance.

Yes, `lm()` linearly interpolates. Thanks for pointing out my error.

To be fair, I’m not sure this will actually make a significant difference. :) Even 200m wouldn’t be a huge error.

I tried a computation that I think may be correct. It gives 319 metres of northing separation between rhumb and creat-circle paths. In case it's of any interest, the R code is below.

    # Northing distance between rhumb and great-circle paths.
    
    library(oce)
    lat <- c(57+18.280/60, 56+54.152/60)
    lon <- -c(3+55.948/60, 4+56.664/60)
    
    # Great-circle path, first in longitude-latitude space, and then
    # (for Mercator projection) in easting-northing space.
    gc <- oce::geodGc(lon, lat, 0.01) # same results for 3rd arg any value < 0.01
    gcXY <- lonlat2map(gc$longitude, gc$latitude, projection="+proj=merc")
    
    # Create function, f(easting), that computes northing value on
    # a rhumb line.  We need this to make the two lines share easting
    # values.
    p <- oce::lonlat2map(lon, lat, "+proj=merc")
    m <- lm(y ~ x, data=p)
    X <- seq(p$x[1], p$x[2], length.out=length(gc$longitude))
    Y <- predict(m, data.frame(x=X))
    f <- approxfun(X, Y) # interpolating function
    
    # Compute the northing error.
    northingError <- f(gcXY$x) - gcXY$y
    maxNorthingError <- round(max(abs(northingError)), 1)
    message("maxNorthingError=", maxNorthingError, " [m]")
    plot(gcXY$x, northingError, type="l", xlab="Easting [m]", ylab="Northing error [m]")
    mtext(paste("max northing error ", maxNorthingError, " [m]"))

> Without crossing a pub road

Or crossing water.

I think given this constraints a line from any non-pub-road, non-water place in GB to the center of the earth is the longest straight line, without considering space bending around mass. :)

The question was "what (and where) is the longest distance you can walk in a straight line..." so that rules out the center of the Earth.

Specifically, the projection used is the Ordnance Survey National Grid projection, which is Transverse Mercator.

The OS published a good introductory (but detailed) guide some years ago: https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/documents/resources/guide-c...

Being an avid hill walker, I love to see how far away from civilization I can get in Colorado on my hikes. I should be able to get really out there, right? My State is 1/3 public, undeveloped land!

The farthest summit from a road is about 6 miles. Kinda made me sad inside. That's how remote you can get from a car.

I have gone on farther trips without crossing a paved road - one being 120 miles that took 6+ days (tough terrain!) by following the crest of an entire mountain range - quite difficult. As the crow flies, that's about 70 miles point to point. If you stretch the theoretical limit between paved roads - encapsulating this entire mountain range, it's about 78 miles. There's about 3 rough 4WD tracks that you can use to cross it - but that's it, in that entire range, any other point across you have to traverse by foot (and there's only a few trails to do so too).

Hope it stays that way.

But again, it's still always <6 miles to where you can drive a car.

I've been to more "remote" places, such as Alaska, with vast Wilderness- but they let you fly planes into there, which seems somewhat like cheating.

Part of the issue is that the vast western BLM land in the USA is mostly some variation of desert; and that desert is very VERY easy to put a road down on, if all the road is a slightly graded path.

I assume you've seen https://www.projectremote.com/remote-statistics/ (updated from defaced/hacked domain)

hmm, I think though there's a reason that the road exists - even in the desert? Probably to mine or a mine town originally? Same with all the roads in the mountains. Resource extraction and motor vehicles kinda go hand in hand.

Most of the ones I've encountered in the high desert have things like ancient mining claims or tiny towns somewhere, but others appear to simply be 4WD trails that have been used "enough". According to the link; Wyoming has the furthest at 21 miles from a road (which is a circle containing 1385 sq miles).

Since distance from a road is a circle, the sq miles needed to get far from it go fast quickly, even six miles is 113 sq mile, and since it's likely a road alongside one edge, you're talking a square of land at least 144 sq mile.

The only things that big are usually parks/nature reserves of some kind, and they often have fire roads or other accesses built for reasons (including people camping, etc).

I've got that point as somewhere near the middle of of Yellowstone NP. The farthest point in Rocky Mountain National Park from is 6. It takes the wind out of me.

In some weird way it's the "no most boring number" problem; if a point is the most remote, then there's a reason to build a road to it, because it's a point of interest, but doing so kills the remoteness.

Personally given how wide a range of things "dirt road" covers, I would consider paved road to be the line - some things that are dirt roads you can do 50+ mph down no problem, others are literally impassible without the best 4 wheel drive vehicles; and some not even that - they're technically on the map but the road is overgrown so much that you can barely get a motorbike down it; and once you're using a motorbike you can go almost anywhere in the world that humans can reach.

Depending on your definition of "mainland", you can get even more remote in southern Louisiana on the peninsula south of Fourleague Bay, southeast of the Atchafalaya Delta. Google Maps shows it as around 26 miles from any road.

But most of the corresponding "circle" will then be in the ocean.

Ha - yeah, if the land is basically an island, there may be an exception. If we look at the map from the article, looks like they avoided major waterways as well.

One of the terms thrown around is "navigable" - which includes things like roads, airports, and waterways that can be traversed by (usually motor) boat.

Obviously since helicopters can land on Mt Everest, you ignore those.

https://unofficialnetworks.com/2022/12/29/helicopter-land-su...

One of the amusing things is that it is not that hard to get away from people - you only need to be about 270 miles from the nearest human to get a situation where that nearest human is in the International Space Station flying overhead. But you have to map out airliner routes, etc, as planes will fly over otherwise empty land/ocean.

Probably to mine or a mine town originally?

Very often yes.

But also as access roads to infrastructure like long-distance power transmission lines, pipelines, or remote communication towers.

Also, there are a lot of fire roads. People don't think of the desert as a place of wildfires, but the desert does indeed burn.

easy to create a road, and little that will destroy an old and little-used one.

There is the pressure to build the road in the first place, as there is about 1.5 billion cars in existence. Having it impossible to find really truly remote places is a symptom of just how much cars have absolutely changed the world.

There's the idea that for every car, you need three car-sized spaces to support it: The area you park the car, the area you drive the car, and the area you'll be driving the car to. That's a lot of roads.

Many of the dirt roads predate the car; cars almost universally demand paved roads, but wagons want roads, too.

There are more cars in existence now, than every wagon every built in all of human civilization combined.

There are also now, more roads.

Somehow I doubt that's very relevant to random wilderness roads in the desert

If we're being pedantic, I think you only need 2 of those spaces while driving the car, and only 1 while it's parked.

Was this site hacked to add the crypto reference on the home page? The rest of the site is very interesting and has nothing to do with crypto, but it seems like a lot of internal pages have been removed and the links redirected to that weird home page.

Edit: Yes, looks like the site has been defaced https://web.archive.org/web/20170611015950/https://remotefoo.... Very sad, seemed like a really cool project and now a lot of pages are unreachable with going through archive.org. Even the search doesn't work.

Edit 2: I think they lost control of that domain, but they have a new site at https://www.projectremote.com/

Thank you - I'll update.

There’s a fun website that I saw that listed all of the most remote points in the lower 48. This is defined as farthest away from a road.

Amazingly, given all of the vast land in the western US, the furthest you can get from a road is only a little over 20 miles. This is in the middle of the Thoroughfare in Yellowstone NP.

I wonder what the definition of road here is. Plenty of roads are just tracks in the dirt where enough vehicles have traveled to leave a mark like logging roads and such.

Unpaved road covers a lot of ground in the western US--from unpaved but well-graded and maintained to you'd better have high-clearance 4WD and know how to use it--in appropriate weather. And the map databases aren't necessarily great at distinguishing things at the edges.

And the map databases aren't necessarily great at distinguishing things at the edges

Very true. I once had Apple Maps direct me down a one-lane road that turned into gravel 20 miles later, then into dirt 20 miles after that, and then eventually became just ruts in the sand used by horses and mules.

I'm sure it was used as a "road" to calculate distances between places, but it was in no way a road.

I have a general "do not leave paved roads when following GPS" rule to prevent things like death (which have occurred). You should know what you're doing and be prepared if you leave the pavement.

This was in an area where dirt and sand roads are more common than paved roads, so it made sense to follow the arrow until it became a track.

Definition is basically, is it drive-able? Can you physically get a car to a point on the road?

An old road could exist, but is in Wilderness, so it somewhat doesn't count, as you can't drive it for legal reasons.

"Drivable" isn't a very useful definition at the margins because it depends on who is driving, in what kind of vehicle, and in what kind of weather.

That is why I added a few more sentences to the working definition in hopes to clarify it and to thwart off contrarianism, which inevitably someone here is going to gleefully practice.

Road implies “path for vehicles” in my mind, but I presume something that might be called a path or a trail could count as a road as well.

Furthest distance in New Zealand is probably on the coast near West Cape in Fiordland National Park: about 70km from roads from what I can tell (the road to Lake Hauroko and the road to Deep Cove/Doubtful Sound via Manapouri Dam).

Looks like there are some amazing walking tracks down there: https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/fi...

Keep in mind that while the US loves its highways, many "roads" in rural areas are dirt or gravel tracks. Here's a drone shot of Hartnet Cathedral Rd in Utah:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/FWp3tzVhwBs7r6bt6

Go to the boundary waters. Huge (1million sq acres) Easy to navigate (canoe), sparsely visited, very remote, and no engines allowed.

I don’t know what the furthest distance from a road is. But I would warn against using that as some definitive measure of remoteness. Especially since not all roads are equal. There are lots of rarely used dirt roads. Additionally, the boundary waters are far from any significant metro (5 hours to twin cities) and very far from a large metro (9 hours to Chicago). The people that go are in driving distance, and there aren’t that many. Compare that to Denver which is not only 1-2 hours away, but has an airport which receives tons of people from the west coast and beyond.

There is also virtually 0 traffic from the north because it’s an international border and more remote wilderness.

>I don’t know what the furthest distance from a road is

Looks around 11 miles,

https://www.peakbagger.com/map/bigmap.aspx?t=W&l=CT&d=10&cx=...

You're probably aware of this, but motorboats are allowed (up to some size and power restrictions) on e.g. the Moose Lake chain to Basswood/Prairie Portage, large parts of Basswood, and Snowbank, among others. They'll also land the forest service's Beaver on any lake big enough for a medical evacuation (I facilitated one from another group from Alice years back).

Not trying to pick nuts, I'd just hate for someone to show up up there and be very disappointed by the presence of motorboats.

If you're planning a trip, it's not hard to avoid them. Talk to your outfitter and do a couple of portages and you'll see none. Do a couple more portages and you can go a couple of days without seeing other people.

Oh, and get up-to-date maps. I was using ones from the summer I guided some 15 years later, and found a campsite or two that had been closed since mine were printed. Some bonus paddling resulted.

Hol-Ry!

I currently live in central Europe, and just recently had a conversation with a coworker who is local. He told me how he has always been quite impressed with how much space there is North America - which is to say that you actually can get away from civilization quite a bit if you want to. Of course, that's not true for all areas of America but it seems way more difficult to just get away in central Europe.

Funny that I go to Europe and impressed by how many trains there are.

Central Europe is more properly compared to the East or Midwest in the USA; because the ability to grow stuff means that even the very rural parts of those areas of the USA are sparsely populated, but populated (you're never more than a few miles from a house kind of thing).

But once you hit the west of the Rockies, it becomes VERY EMPTY unlike anything in Europe, perhaps comparable only to the Ghobi Desert or similar places in Asia.

I miss driving across vast stretches of emptiness in Utah, which is somewhat related. I would see these vast spaces and want to explore, via bike, dirt bike or foot.

Another fun, related cartography activity is to find the longest drive between two very close points on a map. You're invariably going around a mountain with pretty scenery.

I feel like not enough people have noted that "furthest point from a road" is a very different metric than "longest straight line without crossing a road" [0]

It's clear to me that you got that distinction, but several replies seemed to have missed it.

[0] and specifically, in the UK, the middle of Rannoch Moor is the most remote from any road, but doesn't much in terms of longest straight line without a road crossing. And likewise, the line in TFA is actually not very far from a road at any time.

I see a new GeoWizard [1] series covering this in the future

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7w986ni7_g

Was just coming here to comment about GeoWizard. Probably my favorite YouTuber, straight line challenge is awesome, how not to cross American is my favorite YouTube series by a long shot.

The ”How not to travel America” playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_japiE6QKWrCfn7NFL86bRSW...

Don’t miss the similarly named Europe trip either, for anyone new to GeoWizard.

Even before I finished reading the headline, I assumed this was part of his work.

Along those lines, someone else whose attempts I've really enjoyed watching is Ally who recently uploaded the first part of his attempt to cross Scotland in a straight line:

https://youtu.be/_Lcu6qL7NWs

He had one where he wasn't allowed to use roads[0]. But crossing them is fine, the man can teleport across railroads anyway[1].

[0] - https://youtu.be/pDU9BOtX80A

[1] - https://youtu.be/QkLDThED4T4?t=2195

Even cooler when you consider the right to roam https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

I live in a state that has very little public land, which would make any attempt to walk it incredibly difficult

It looks like the author found this line using manual inspection, but it seems possible to automate the search: https://github.com/BradleyWood/Longest-Line-In-Polygon/blob/.... It might even be sufficiently fast, despite the O(n^3) running time, because the 'n' is the number of points per polygon, not total, and you can operate on each polygon in order of "wingspan" (you can't stop once you find the longest straight line in the longest polygon, but you can once your best line is greater than the wingspan of the remaining polygons).

I remember talking to a group of people about the "vastness of America" and mentioned that no matter where you go you're never really more than 20 miles from a road. Not a single person believed me. I never did follow up with investigation. But I do sometimes ask people this question.

Ultimately, people seem to think there are these great patches of untouched land on a vast scale where it simply doesn't exist.

Yep, even the furthest spot in Wyoming in the Thorofare wilderness complex is something like 19 miles out from a road.

One thing to keep in mind is that only a few miles over rugged terrain can be a _lot_. A few miles away from a remote forest road in the wrong direction and you might not see any people for years and years.

I do search and rescue out here, and even with helicopters it's pretty vast; https://www.peakbagger.com/map/bigmap.aspx?t=W&l=CT&d=9&cx=-...

> A few miles away from a remote forest road in the wrong direction and you might not see any people for years and years.

This is essentially what happened to this McCandless guy in Alaska. That book about him -Into The Wild, by Krakauer - is super well written and a very interesting story. The movie based on the book is also quite well produced.

I found a reference at http://remotefootprints.org/ linked from BBC, but it looks like the site was hacked by a Bitcoin/crypto scammer.

Anyway, they claim that in USA rhat 22miles is the farthest you can get from a road of any kind that supports a vehicle, and still be in "developable" terrain.

That would exclude mountains, lakes, floodplains, and maybe or maybe not forests (because they could be cut down?)

I think they lost control of that domain but they have a new site here: https://www.projectremote.com/

Pretty sure Nevada has places you can go that are 20 mi from a paved road.

Road vs paved road does a lot of heavy lifting.

But even so if you calculate the area needed to be 20 miles from a road, it gets quite vast quickly (it has to be a circle 20 miles in radius).

I kinda want to find out now.

You'd want to search using GIS tools, and then try to verify the pavidity via aerial photos. Around Table Mountain might be a place to start. 20 miles is a long way, and 40 miles is even longer between roads.

For comparison, the entirety of Mount Rainier National Park is less than 20 miles on a side. So you're looking for someplace you can fit Mount Rainier on all sides of you.

This is neat. I pretty easily found a 183km straight line through central WA, from Wenatchee/Cashmere, NNW up to the Canadian border. I can only visually confirm (via Google Earth) that it doesn't cross paved roads though.

Since Route 20, a state highway, goes all the way across the state, from west to east, and it's between Wenatchee and the Canadian border, it seems to me that your straight line would have to end when it intersects Route 20 somewhere near Diablo.

Yep, you're right. So, at most 148km.

Uh, that can't be right. Highway 20 would cut through that in the middle. Perhaps the software is a bit confused because the highway closes during winters?

Also, the terrain profile of this straight line would make the Scottish line look like a mini-golf course!

This is mainly about getting getting the correct roads data, but I would be more interested in the algorithmic question: given a roads network, how do you find the longest line not crossing a road?

The linked blog post mentioned they "calculated the areas of all the polygons to identify the largest ones". Just drawing some lines on a plane, there are not necessarily any polygons. And they say start and end points must be on vertices, but I'm not sure why. So it's not very clear.

This paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07389# uses an algorithm called 'branch-and-bound'.

This would be a cool metric to use in various analyses. It's a number that's guaranteed to be shrinking fast in today's world and I'd bet there's a quality-of-life benefit to be had by trying to optimize for growing it rather than shrinking it.

> 'a paved surface for vehicular use'

The author is assuming that all "restricted access" roads are unpaved, which I think is unlikely to be true. I wonder if there's data about which roads are paved.

Regardless, very interesting stuff, and great analysis.

In the UK even "public" roads deep in the countryside are often unpaved.

Loved it. Seemed like it was discovered by manual search

> Crown copyright and database rights 2023.

Do i, as a US citizen, have to respect Crown Copyright? I mean, the USA originated in a revolt against that very same crown. The USA is by constitution and temperament forbidden from giving out titles and such. We respect free markets, content creators and their successors in interest here.

Technically, legal proceedings could be taken against you in the UK. Realistically - most of the stuff covered by Crown Copyright falls under the Open Government License and is free to use once attributed.

https://www.cla.co.uk/crown-copyright

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-lice...

The United States is party to the Berne Convention, so yes.

In as much as anyone has to respect the copyright coming from any jurisdiction they are not in. Which for the most of the world generally means that, yes, you do have to respect it. It being the UK and your historical reasoning isn't very relevant.

One of the main things that allows global trade to happen as freely as it does, is countries cooperating so that copyright can be legally enforced across them. The resulting court cases are likely to be less actionable if you have no presence there, but you can be sued in that country for breach of copyright and have a judgement placed upon you. It's bilateral, a Brit may wonder the same thing about the US or any other country and the answer would be the same.

The Pirate Bay disagrees. They rather splendidly told the usa to gtfo, as did kim dotcom. Ymmv.

> We respect free markets, content creators

That’s awesome. Please respect the content creators at the Ordnance Survey then.

Since the US don't extradite even for serious offences You can probably just ignore it and be tried in absentia if caught and prosecuted.

You'll have to join the 66% of your countrymen who can't travel abroad however.

this is an interesting statistic. I'd love to have a reference!

Seems there are some stats running around about the number of US citizens who hold passports.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/804430/us-citzens-owning...

https://today.yougov.com/topics/travel/articles-reports/2021...

Apparently only 37% of Americans have a valid current passport

Even assuming that includes passport cards for Canada/Mexico, unless someone lives near the border, an international trip is a relatively big deal for a lot of families. The US is big and has a lot of variety for travel. It's really not surprising that a (sizable) minority don't have near-term plans to travel internationally.

Absolutely agree. The socio-economic breakdown of the research backs this up. It's very strongly correlated with household income

Can't is a strong word to use word for people who opt not to have a passport.

I'd use that same logic to then say 99.9% of Europeans can't travel abroad since they don't have a valid airline ticket in their possession. If your response is "well they can just get one!" then maybe you should rethink your argument.

Funnily enough you can go to most countries in the EU without a passport or a airline ticket if you're European. (you only need an ID card)

But I digress and think you're right. Probably lots of people simple don't need/want a passport to travel outside of the US. Otherwise they would have had one

you might not even need an ID practically, just legally. I've never been checked at borders or whatever in Europe. Not even when flying to Madeira or exiting/entering the Geneva airport, which is not EU.

You're assuming you need a valid airline ticket to travel abroad in Europe, you don't.

It's perfectly possible to travel abroad in Europe without any form of ticket. You can just drive, walk, cycle or sail and many people do regularly.

They’re explicitly not making that point. They’re in fact arguing that “can’t” is a weird choice of word for which the post they’re responding to has drawn an extremely arbitrary line.

If anything, you and (at the moment) all of your siblings are helping explain just how arbitrary the line is.

Is it not possible to drive, walk, cycle or sail from the US to Canada or Mexico?

Not legally without a passport.

> 99.9% of Europeans can't travel abroad

Some of them and I'm guessing more than 0.1% could just walk to another country by midnight (it's 5PM CET). And way more than that if they set off next morning.

In seven hours I can leave The Netherlands, cross Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Switzerland, and end up in the southern part of Germany. Give me two more hours and I can visit Liechtenstein, Austria, and Italy too.

Probably not on foot though?

No, although in 13 hours you could walk from Belgium through Luxembourg and into Germany. And you could add France without much bother too.

> I'd use that same logic to then say 99.9% of Europeans can't travel abroad since they don't have a valid airline ticket in their possession.

That doesn't make any sense, you can literally walk to foreign countries from most of Europe. Because of Schengen large parts of the EU you don't even need any paperwork, the rationale is that it was legal for you to be on that side of the border, you strolled over onto this side, chances are you're legal here too.

If you're in a vehicle (which again, you can walk, it's not mandatory) the Schengen internal borders have no permanent checks. During COVID some of them were closed, and once in a while somebody might put up police stops - like they would for drunk driving (Americans surely have that right?) but in general in Schengen the country borders matter only slightly more than your US state borders do.

Interestingly, paperless travel was the norm in Europe before 1914, too, though there was no Schengen. Happier times before the war tore down mutual trust among countries.

Only the Russian empire and the Ottoman empire required passports from foreign visitors.

> That doesn't make any sense

They know. That’s the point.

There can be customs checks at or near Schengen borders.

Yes, just like two thirds of Americans can encounter a customs check on their daily commute because they live within 100 miles of a border.

Schengen borders can have customs checks, but only temporarily in nature as a last resort in case of a serious threat to public policy or security, and in such a way as to impose the absolute minimum of restrictions possible.

In practice Schengen borders are comparable to state borders in the US. Sure, they technically are borders, but in practice it is just a line drawn on a map. It is not uncommon for European armies to accidentally "invade" another country because they took a wrong turn during an exercise.

>That doesn't make any sense, you can literally walk to foreign countries from most of Europe

Replace "abroad" with overseas then.

Most people of Europe does not currently have enough food and water to make a trip across a national border, if we are still talking about arbitrary temporary constraints.

Almost no one in Great Britain can travel to the Continent unless they are already in a boat.

I'd love to know where you get your news.

... what?

I think you are greatly overestimating the size of many European countries. A significant fraction of the population lives within 75 miles of a national border. That's a bottle of water and a snack by car - if you're feeling thirsty when you leave. If you go by bike you might want to pack a lunch, but that's about it.

If you have a job, any job, you have the means to be in another country tomorrow evening.

How long do you think it takes to go to a foreign country? Couldn't a Brit just take the Eurostar to Paris?

This is such nonsense.

People in the UK can travel to Northern Ireland, part of the UK, and legally walk into the Republic of Ireland, an EU member nation. So the point still stands.

No i think its accurate.

At the point of asking "Can you travel abroad?" the answer for 67% is "No"

Also as a European i can walk to another country now before nightfall if you pack me some sandwiches and promise me a bed/pint when i arrive.

Traveling internationally from the US is a major trip in a way that it's just not in the EU.

From Edinburgh, you can reach 9 foreign countries in 1000 km: Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, and Ireland. That's on the edge of Europe! If you're in Vienna, it's a whopping 31: Denmark, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Moldavia, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Czechia, Switzerland, Slovakia, Monaco, San Marino, Vatican City, Slovenia, Croatia, Northern Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Hungary, with Turkey and the UK juuuust out of reach.

From the US, if you live in Miami, a whopping four countries are within 1000 km: Cuba, Bahamas, Jamaica, and the UK (via its offshore islands). For most of the US, it's just one--either Canada or Mexico. Only if you're in Puerto Rico can you access a large number of countries in a short distance, and that's mostly because almost every Antilles island is a different independent country.

Or another way of putting it, in the distance it takes to get from the third largest city in the US (Chicago) to the largest (New York), it is hard to find a straight line in even the largest European countries that keeps you in the country!

Uhm, kinda, it depends. Overall Copyright is all mushed together under some kind of global agreement right?

Because must I remind you, of your post of an hour ago: "property rights are paramount." ;)

The Crown isn't really the monarchy when used in this sense and it doesn't have much to do with titles and such. It's a synecdoche used to refer to the UK government (and the governments of some commonwealth countries). Crown Copyright is the copyright the government holds in the material it creates. In this case, the Ordnance Survey, which is a UK government agency.

Whether you have to respect that copyright is a different matter, although it may be unwise to use Ordnance Survey mapping data for commercial purposes without a license.

> The Crown isn't really the monarchy when used in this sense and it doesn't have much to do with titles and such. It's a synecdoche used to refer to the UK government

That’s also the Crown the US was revolting against, so...

I think it's actually the US which is more likely to take issue with you for breaking the copyright, than the UK would. Considering the US publishes an annual report on copyright/IP rights enforcement about it's trading partners that it deems to be insufficient[0].

[0]: https://ustr.gov/sites/default/files/USTR-2016-Special-301-R...

No need to be edgy. Crown copyright is just the phrase used for copyright created when the UK (And Canada, and Australia, and others) create copyrighted content.

It's nothing special.

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