On 03/08/14 17:02, Tom Hughes wrote:
In reality such roads may, even though they are not adopted and are hence not maintained at public expense, be highways with an associated right of way for the public.
That's more likely for long established, and probably rural roads. For recently established private roads (and councils seem to be more and more reluctant to adopt) they won't have the established usage, of 20 years, to make them public highways, by default, and one suspects title deeds are written with explicit, limited, rights of way (e.g. in one case very near me "all purposes in connection with the use and enjoyment of the property" that is accessed via a private road across land belonging to another property.
Interestingly, social housing is now normally set up as unadopted roads, often with fences, although not closed gates, around the estate. I tend to assume that the intent is that you only use those roads if you actually want to go somewhere in the estate, so tend to code them as access=destination, and reserve private for those cases where there is a strong implication that you must seek explicit permission before entering by the default means of transport for the road.
Generally, though, I don't think that OSM really captures all the subtleties of level of privateness of highways. There are probably several dimensions to properly encode all the details.
Also, for many purposes, adoption status is important, even if the road is a highway. Already mentioned is that it can affect who enforces parking rules, but it also often implies a lower standard of maintenance.
It's quite likely that the owners have the right to control parking but less likely that they have the right to control access and passing along the road.
There are also a lot of roads that are not labelled as private, but where there is no general right of access, e.g. the roadways to the garages behind my flats only have a right of way to people authorised, directly or indirectly, by a leaseholder or the freeholder, but there is no sign to say that that is the case, and there are actually covenants forbidding signs.
Another example is back alleys. Rarely these are adopted, but in the more usual case that they are unadopted, you will not generally find that there is a public right of way preventing the gating of the alley (even though they are in regular use by fly tippers, and drug addicts!).
As I hinted above, there is a strong trend towards making all new residential roads private), although especially at the top and bottom ends. Most of the presumed private roads I see in an urban environment are less than 20 years old, so cannot have become dedicated to the public by default.
In my estimation, urban private roads are are under-coded on OSM (and properly coding them would show a worrying trend towards privatisations of the road network).
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