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, with one of the largest such roads being the Summerlin Parkway, a privately owned freeway in Las Vegas. 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, for example, the Dulles Greenway in Virginia.
England and Wales are thought to have about 40,000 private roads. They are not normally the responsibility of the local authority, but the authority may provide services such as street lighting (e.g. Avenue Rise, Bushey, Hertfordshire). They normally have to be maintained by residents. They are referred to as unadopted roads because they have not gone through the statutory process of adoption, for example under Highways Act 1980 s37 or s38. Even if not expressly or implicitly dedicated for public use, 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 total road network in Sweden. However, only four per cent of the total road transportation work is carried on these, mostly rural, roads. In fact, only one per cent of the road transports are made on the half of the roads the that does not receive any government subsidies for their maintenance, with the bulk not receiving subsidies being built and maintained by the forestry industry as needed and most often closed to the public. New private roads that receive government support are often built by the government and transferred to the roads principal stakeholders, those living along it. These form a private road association to maintain it and get subsidies by the government to keep it open to the rest of the public. Even factoring in the unpaid work of the members of the association, the cost of operation and maintenance is often considerably less than a comparable public road.
Famous quotes containing the words private and/or road:
“One key, one solution to the mysteries of the human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is a happy thing that there is no royal road to poetry. The world should know by this time that one cannot reach Parnassus except by flying thither.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)