Travelling further, without a car, then requires use of public transportation and by using public transportation depending where you are you have implied consent to being searched "for safety".
Acknowledging civil asset forfeiture is a problem in some jurisdictions, private automobiles still provide a greater expectation of privacy than public modes of transport.
Existing on public transit is not an automatic agreement to be searched as you describe.
Here’s an attorney website that describes your general rights:
https://azharillc.com/blog/youre-riding-the-l-train-can-cops...
There are many more things that are illegal for you to be doing as a driver of a car versus existing in public on public transportation. Many of these things can trigger searching your possessions being legal compared to being a person on public transit.
You’re also required to present your drivers license and fully identify yourself if you are stopped for minor traffic infractions like a tail light being out.
As a pedestrian, in most states you do not have to present ID to an officer on the street.
For example, it’s generally not probable cause to search on public transit if an officer smells alcohol, while in a vehicle it’s basically an automatic search of your whole car. You would also have the issue of what a court or jury thinks of the reasonableness of the search based on the context. If you’re quietly minding your own business on the train and you smell like alcohol is a judge or jury going to think the search was reasonable? Now compare that to a driver in a vehicle smelling like alcohol.
Furthermore, the whole concept of a DUI checkpoint where every person is stopped and questioned is at the very least impractical and often illegal for pedestrians.
Thank you for your service as the incorrect carbrain of the day.
I live in central TX and until recently it has been fairly rural. It is now very suburban and it is very common to have to drive 20 miles or so for groceries. There are also lots of traffic lights. For most there is almost no practical way to get to any consumer business on foot and no public transport. Twenty years ago it was "living in the country" and travailing for anything was just part of the deal to live here. It is about the same but with the added joys of traffic, less privacy, and higher taxes.
Your area was rural very recently. Obviously in rural areas people are driving, but the fact that your area developed recently means they had the luxury of hindsight and a clean slate. The fact that you can’t walk or bike to stuff was an active choice, not an unforeseen inevitability.
They could have chosen to build out developments where even people in single family homes could reach some or all of their daily destinations without vehicles.
The fact that it recently urbanized means they have even less of an excuse than other parts of the country that built car-focused infrastructure for the first time as a mid-century project that was never done before.
Your town is like the millennial who now should know better not to post funny drunk pictures on Facebook or any other social media, but back in 2008 nobody knew what social media would become.
I.e., I fully understand and accept that undoing a bunch of 1950s-1970s infrastructure and property lines is impractical. When highways were first built through towns we didn’t know the impact back then. But we do know that now and your local planners ignored those lessons when they more recently developed your area.
Your municipality doesn’t really have an excuse. They already had the knowledge available of the negative impacts of car-centric development. They already have the case studies of the Netherlands building out car-focused suburbs in the 70s and then reversing and correcting that pattern. They just didn’t have the imagination to go look, they just figured it’s fine to build exactly like everyone else and toss up yet another big box store parking lot.
They could have done things like making sure split up farm parcels developed into neighborhoods follow a consistent grid, implement traffic calming and other measures that make walking and biking attractive, avoiding stroads by separating the use cases of streets and roads and designing accordingly, and zoning new development to make sure storefronts put parking lots in the back instead of in front where they lengthen walking distances.
There are a number of Google Maps examples of suburbs where people live less than a half a mile from grocery stores but the legal walking distance without cutting through private property or winding through non-grid subdevelopments takes multiple uncomfortable miles that include crossing multi-lane high-speed limit roads.
That makes no sense. How far did you have to drive for groceries before your area became "very suburban?" If you have to drive 20 miles for groceries, then you're not in the suburbs, you're still very rural.
In any case, if you don't like it in the suburbs, move. I'm sure there's at least one other family in the city who'd love to swap places with you. At least they would if they weren't required, likely unnecessarily, to commute to work every weekday.
Most people don’t live in NYC. Transit and urban planning solutions appropriate for there is supremely unhelpful for most other places.
And I would assume you get a small license plate? Similar to e-scooters