Originally Posted by tandempower

Let's assume you're right and there is a water-tight control-system between the legal system and the insurance industry that prevents the possibility of liberating property owners from potential lawsuits. That discourages property owners from allowing camping or any other form of commerce taking place on their land without sufficient payment to make it worth their risk. That, in turn, means less bike-camping spots and/or more expensive ones.

So what's the problem with paying more to camp, you may ask. Well, think about the bottom line of bike touring. It takes more time to travel less distance than with motorized forms of transportation. So if lodging-prices are normalized according to a standard that requires covering the costs of liability insurance and whatever property-management costs go along with satisfying insurance requirements, that is going to discourage bike-camping as an alternative to car-touring for people who wish to tour.

Economically, we've reached a point where the economy no longer affords most people the opportunity to tour. For one thing, it's very hard to get time off from most jobs. Second, if it was easier to get enough time off to go on long bike tours AND people made enough money to car-tour, then the roads and highways would fill up with traffic as they used to do before the 2000s. So, essentially, we're in an economic state of travel-repression because no one wants an economy where everyone can afford the time AND the cost of touring around in their car.

So if bike campers are held to the standards of cost and time that the economy affords to car-touring, bike-camping is going to be subject to as strong of restriction as car-touring and camping. This is a sad prospect considering that bike touring/camping is the solution to the problem of population growth and travel that has more or less hit a brick wall in recent decades. If the law won't bend to allow the economy to evolve, what then?