Bonus Randeeeee:
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Illegalism
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Where is it illegal to sleep in your car?
almost everywhere in the USA.
Here in Statesia we built "rest stops" on the side of the Interstate were you could stay overnight but have to move on. They're wonderful on a 5-day roadtrip, but if you have to live in your car, they're a reliable toilet, maybe water and one night's decent sleep i guess? I don't know, I've never thought about it in depth. They always seem too far from civilization here to be any use to the unhoused.
Kind of on purpose!
my brain says it's part of that whole Eisenhower Interstate System thing where they made part of the interstate usable as runways every so often, but i'm tired and high and my brain conflates shit when that happens and now i'm too lazy to look shit up.
The runway thing is false
Explaining the interstate highway system and why it exists feels so fucking pepe sylvia meme.
This may be an over simplified version but it's not that crazy to imagine that after fighting a world war where maneuver warfare and mass logistics became even more important than before the USA would want to work on improving those capabilities.
What's more crazy is how it absolutely fucked up communities of color and ruined so many lives in the name of segregation labeled as "progress."
Still, Eisenhower as president, looking through the lens of a general, saw the need for an efficient means to move men and material in war and how great it would be for the peacetime economy too.
At least that's my understanding but I'm open to correction.
Nope. Look up why napoleon³ did it in paris. Same thing.
There's a bit of tye 'moving military shit' thing, but Eisenhower was jniquely positioned to know how trash roads were fpr that. We still use trains today. And we as a culture and government hate trains.
Roads are great when you need to move something only a few miles and every family has a car or cars and the suburbs are getting built out.
It wasn't just for military use, agreed, I just know that was part of it.
Was largely for militsry use, just not in the way you think.
Well highways do make sense as a concept, having a network of highways between major urban areas and other places of interest is good.
What doesn't make sense is having highways EVERYWHERE, making them more than 3 lanes in either direction (even this is a sign that you have way too much traffic and need to move that onto railways), and especially running them through urban areas.
Only someone dumb or evil does those things.
it is fun to look for the little airplanes painted on the side of the highways though
having been homeless, yeah rest stops basically only exist to make getting from one unwelcoming town with a gas station to another a little more comfortable for people with somewhere to be. we have built our hatred of the nomadic cultures of north america into our hatred of the poor. or more accurately, we hate the poor and then define the poor by the qualities we seek to enforce. because the thing to understand is that the people whose land we stole and the people who we stole from their land to make this country weren't poor until the aristocracy redefined them as being poor
Well put. The indigenous people in America were anything but "poor".
If we go a little further south and look at the Aztec, they were basically the wealthiest nation in the world at the time. Even by European standards. Reading primary sources from the first Europeans encountering them makes this really clear.
The US government not only redefined the indigenous people as poor, but fucked their material conditions to the point where redefinition was no longer necessary.
America
Lots of countries in Europe.
In mine for example.
Really?
I live in Europe and have a van and have been using that parking for the past 4 years and have never had any bother.
Which EU countries are you referring to?
Also to camp on public land? You can on most public property in Ontario as long as you move your camp 100m every 21 days.
Almost no public land in a lot of countries. pretty much everything is owned by someone in the UK
US national forests have a similar rule. It's called "dispersed camping." The issue is, there aren't many national forests. Especially on the east coast, most land is owned by someone, and even state/federal land is rarely a national forest, and nothing else has this rule as far as I'm aware.
FWIW basically the entire state of Nevada is public land and dispersed camping is allowed for 14 days in a given spot.
That being said Nevada is an absolute wasteland with no water or other natural resources so it's kind of a hard place to exist in general.
You can in state and national parks in the US too... If you're sneaky about it, or if you pay a lot fee
If you move the car every day it should be fine anywhere in the EU*, but that in itself can be pretty annoying if, say, you're trying to keep a job.
If not, there's all sorts of regulations about where and when. IIRC there is no distinction made between cars that are made for sleeping in and those that aren't. But there is a distinction between parking it and living in it.
Personal experience: if you choose your place carefully you're good for at least a week. OTOH, that was a while ago.
* I just remembered that touristy places might not be fine, as happened to me in Holland.
Yeah that's why I'm asking, I've got a van. Not a coach-built moho, just a SWB white van.
Have been driving that around Spain, and when driving back to the UK, several other EU countries and I've never had a knock or been questioned by the pigs or even disgruntled locals.
I have seen loads of mess left by other campers, which will be the root of the problem and we all get tarred as a result
So your experience tracks with mine, and my van did have windows and was clearly recognizable as a mobile home 👍
The legal situation differs from country to country but I'm pretty sure in Germany it's not per se illegal to sleep in your car, whether it's a mobile home or not, but there's a load of exceptions to that.
I used to work for a guy every other weekend, during which time I parked 2 nights next to a cemetary because it was the best spot in that village. Never a problem. IIRC the police even came once, I explained the situation, they said OK and left again.
It's often not, but people do report it. It's just such an asshole mind set
Under the "loitering" you are not allowed to stand on the sidewalk. Act of homelessnes itself is illegal.