I enjoy hitting curb strips once in a while - they’ve been a source of some pretty good finds for me. I travel around the eastern half of the country pretty extensively as part of my job, and of course now that I’m addicted to detecting, I pay closer attention to potential detecting locations as I go from place to place, even If I don’t have my detector with me (it’s like a sickness, isn’t it
). Curb strips are areas that always attract my attention, because they can be a great option for an “out-of-towner” like me to make some good finds without having to sweat securing permission, especially if time is short.
Anyway, my point in mentioning all this is that while it is generally true that the area between the sidewalk and the street is public right-of-way, my experience has shown it’s not always the case. It can definitely vary from town to town, and sometimes even from neighborhood to neighborhood within the same town. Probably where you need to be the most careful is places where there is no sidewalk - in many cities/municipalities, there is still a right-of-way a specified distance from the center of the street, but it can be almost as likely that there isn’t.
I know this issue got pretty hotly contested in another thread a month or so ago, but it’s definitely pretty easy to confirm. Simply go to the tax assesor’s web site for the town in question, pull up the GIS map, and you can easily see the property boundaries - probably at least 85% of the time or more, the property boundary excludes the area between the sidewalk and street curb. An alternative method is using an app like OnX Hunt.
Of course, the other problem is that at least 50% or more of home owners don’t understand that they don’t own that land, so yes, the best advice if confronted is to simply apologize for any confusion and move along, probably to a different street.
