[Talk-GB] [OSM-talk] Tagging of private roads

[David Woolley]

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).