Private road

A private road is a road owned and maintained by a private individual, organization, or company rather than by a government. Consequently, unauthorized use of the road may be considered trespassing, and some of the usual rules of the road may not apply. The most common type of private road is a residential road maintained by a homeowners association, housing co-op, or other group of individual homeowners (e.g. the private places of St. Louis, Missouri, Rossmoor, California, Celebration, Florida, Camp John Hay in Baguio, Borocay, the Ayala and Fort Bonifacio Development between Makati and Pasig, Laredo, Texas, and Ford's Colony near Williamsburg, Virginia). There are also networks of private highways in Italy and other nations. Such highways typically are toll roads whose upkeep is paid for with user fees.

England and Wales are thought to have about 40,000 private roads. They are not the responsibility of the local authority, so have to be maintained by residents. Public use over time may nonetheless have created public rights of way; though by Part 6 of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006, in force from 2 May 2006, many public rights of way for motor vehicles in private roads have now been extinguished.

Private road associations manage two-thirds of the road network in Sweden. A 2001 government-commissioned evaluation found that the cost of operation and maintenance of private roads was often less than half the cost of publicly managed roads. [SOU:2001:67 2001]

ee also

*Road
*Free market roads
*Private highway
*Dirt road

References