Administrative borders are, by-and-large, where laws and regulations change. When you are on one side of the border, it is legal to do x and illegal to do y. Cross the border and now x is illegal but you have to have z otherwise you can be fined.
It is very inconvenient for people living close to the border, because they have to negotiate changes in regulatory environments, currencies, etc. just to pop to the shops to buy toothpaste.
Border control posts become bottlenecks to movement, targets for dissidents or foreign powers, and also they can be architectural blights on the built environment. (a different idea could be "architecturally positive borders and border posts")
Proposed is the use of a sigmoid function to define the proportional application of the two different legal systems.
Standing exactly on the border, both systems would apply exactly 50%. As you moved away, the application of the near-sie regine would rapidly increase, and the application of the far-side would rapidly decrease. At a distance Q from the border, the rules and laws of the territory you were in might apply with 70% force, while the rules and laws of the territory on the far side would apply with 30% force.
This may, of course, mean that anything you do near the border would be illegal, but that seems to be common practice near borders anyway so I don't see that being a major problem.
The main issue would be to define the parameters of the sigmoid function. How quickly should it fall off? Should it be normalised to a fixed distance from the border (e.g. 10km)? Or should it be proportional to the distance from the border to the administrative seat, or the geographical mean centre of the territory? If so, should it be straight-line distance, or should it be walking distance (so as to account for natural borders following rivers, mountain ranges and seas?)
Because of being amthematiclaly defined, it should be more imperfious to political manipulation.-- pocmloc, Mar 28 2021 Hyder, Alaska and Stewart, BC Border. https://en.wikipedi...a/File:Hyder_AK.jpg [AusCan531, Mar 30 2021] Germany shares land borders with 9 other countries and China has 14. This would not be feasible to try to implement.-- xandram, Mar 28 2021 //Because of being amthematiclaly defined, it should be more imperfious to political manipulation.//
Awesome. [marked-for-tagline]-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 28 2021 It would be implemented simultaneously everywhere to avoid problems-- pocmloc, Mar 28 2021 So, do I spend half of the time in prison, then?-- RayfordSteele, Mar 28 2021 Perfectly half baked.
//This may, of course, mean that anything you do near the border would be illegal// If we imagine Jurisdiction A, where the set of illegal activities is X and Jurisdiction B, where the set of illegal activities is NOT X, then at the border of the jurisdictions, everything is half illegal and half not illegal (or legal, if you will), rather than everything being swept into the set of illegal acts, which I will term set L. Set L interacts with-- calum, Mar 28 2021 </Mr Turkentine>-- calum, Mar 28 2021 Perhaps make the legality time-dependent? Area "A"s laws until lunchtime, then it all swaps to "B". Or even a finer scale, so the legality depends on the EXACT time you are observed/caught doing whatever.-- neutrinos_shadow, Mar 28 2021 Hang on, how do we deal with tripoints or quadripoints?-- calum, Mar 29 2021 For over 50 years, the St. Lawrence River border between Ontario (Canada) and New York (USA) has been in exactly this state.
When I was 18, Ontario age of majority was 21; it was legal for 18 year olds to drink in New York, so Ontario teens stuffed their clown cars full of party animals and drove over the bridge to stateside dives. A few years later, when I was 21, our age of majority was 18, so all the New Yawkers came to our biker bars. Perfectly legal, but not really in the spirit of the law. No real harm done, and the wealth was shared equally across border towns.
Note: Currently, legal drinking age in Ontario is 19, and in NY it's 21, so Canada gets all the 'economic benefits' of cross-border alcoholourism.-- Sgt Teacup, Mar 29 2021 70% of you has been remanded in custody. The other 30% of you is free to go. We've left it in a plastic bag by the front desk, if you'd like to call someone you pick it up.-- pertinax, Mar 29 2021 "Just a pound of flesh??? Oh, luxury..."-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Mar 30 2021 The town of Hyder, Alaska sorta had this for awhile. It's only accessible by land through Stewart, BC. They used Canadian money, phone system and did a lot of their shopping on the other side of 'the line'. There were no police or Border checks when I was working in the region although that might have changed - you just drove/walked across where the bitumen became gravel and you where in the States. 24hr drinking or 'whatever.
I believe that for a while if there was a criminal issue the Mounties could cross to sort things out but the legalities might have put the kibosh on that by now. It was a 'gray area'. See link for Border pic.-- AusCan531, Mar 30 2021 random, halfbakery