**8. Vertical (Perpendicular) Accessibility**

In order to be able to walk along the coast, one needs to reach it from the hinterland whether urban or nonurban. Unlike horizontal access, vertical accessibility is less geographically determined. There are often no historically preassigned vertical public rights of way. There is no shared norm about what a reasonable expression of vertical access would be and, unlike horizontal access, no internationally prevalent legacy of government responsibility.

#### *8.1. Dilemmas Surrounding Vertical Access Rights*

Many concrete questions arise regarding vertical access rights. Access from where to where? Who should be obliged to establish, finance, or maintain vertical routes? Should all access routes be located on public land, or should there be a right to pass through privately owned properties? What distinctions should be made between rural and urban areas? Should there be a norm of maximal distance between vertical access routes? In their quest to secure vertical access from within the city or region, government (or civil society) bodies are likely to encounter many conflicts between real estate considerations and beach-users' interests. These might be even more diverse and complex than maintaining horizontal access.

To these dilemmas, one should add issues of social-distributive justice. Control of vertical access could be used as a socially exclusionary mechanism, as argued and empirically supported by Ernst [7], Kim & Nicholls [49], and Kim et al. [50]. For example, high parking fees, absence of public transportation, delineation of routes that serve some communities more than others, and entry-right preference for local residents over outsiders (or the reverse)—all of these could challenge social-distributive justice in vertical coastal access. Since beach maintenance is also a public finance issue, the issue is who should bear the burden: local taxpayers? Regional or national taxpayers? Imposition of access fees (or parking fees) could help to regulate the overload, but such fees can also have a socially selective effect (see [51]).

#### *8.2. The Social Obligation of Property and "the Right to Roam"*

Vertical access can be pre-planned (or retrofitted) through government action on public land. However, such routes are not always feasible and are necessarily inflexible. What if vertical access was permitted over privately owned land, where it does not interfere severely with privacy or with production? The issue of vertical access over privately owned land highlights some of the ideological differences between conceptions of private property rights.

In most jurisdictions in our sample, the law on real-property rights broadly follows the more traditional perspective, whereby passing through property without the owner's permission is trespassing and is punishable. There are, however, several jurisdictions in our set where the ideology of property rights leans closer to the conception of "the social function of property" or "the social obligation of property" [52–54]. In those countries, vertical accessibility to the coast is part of an over-riding right that members of the general public have the right to hike across and enjoy privately owned open land, under certain limitations. This legal approach is popularly known as "the right to roam", and usually includes the beaches as open land.

Among our sample jurisdictions are several where there is a right to roam (but with detailed legal differences). These are Denmark [31], three of the four coastal German states [26] (the German state of Schleswig-Holstein recognizes the right to roam along the beach only, not to access private land vertically), Scotland, and, to a more modest degree, also England [24]. In these jurisdictions, the issue of vertical accessibility to the coast is less acute. For example, in Denmark, as explained in detail by Anker [31], the right to roam is deeply embedded in law and public expectations. One of the expressions of this right concerning coastal access is that existing footpaths leading to beaches across private uncultivated land may not be removed without special permission [31].
