> There are more miles of coastline with legally mandated public access in the US than in France.

This sentence is silly. France is smaller than Texas.

That is exactly my point, regarding size. California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and Texas all have very strong mandated public beach access. Other states are less progressive, but saying France is some totally unique exemplar of public access is wrong.

> There are more miles of coastline with legally mandated public access in the US than in France.

France has 2,000 miles of total coastline (before considering access); Alaska alone has over 6,600.

A more sane comparison would be share of coastline with public access, or maybe for some purposes per-capita public access coastline. But absolute miles of public access coastline is silly.

If you include Alaska, ~75% of the US coastline has meaningful public access protections. If you don't include Alaska, because people don't sunbathe topless there or whatever, it's like ~20% based on my napkin math?

The original comment was "Nothing comparable exists in the US". Given that the entire West Coast and other key beach recreation states like North Carolina and Hawaii have stellar laws on public access, the root comment was simply not true.

Well, 20% is really not comparable with France's 100%, is it? Or it is comparable, but quite unfavourably.