The Road Traffic Act applies to any road that the public can travel along.
As with most law, it's not quite that simple:
There are said to be about 40,000 private roads in England and Wales. Many are in the Home Counties Surrey seems to have the most, at more than 2,000. Most date from the end of the nineteenth century or later, though some are older. In private roads, different areas of law meet highway law, property law, tort, administrative law and others.
Is it a highway?Legally speaking, private roads can be arranged into three main categories. Some are highways, usually because they are through-roads and public use has led to the creation of a highway by dedication and acceptance. The existence of a highway attracts section 130 of the Highways Act 1980, and the general duty placed on the highway authority to protect the rights of the public.
The highway authority has an array of powers, though not the full range which applies to highways maintainable at the public expense (i.e. ordinary public roads). Road humps and other traffic calming devices, for example, can't be installed by the highway authority in private highways, under the powers in sections 90A - 90I of the Highways Act.
Does the public have access?In some private roads, public use takes place and is tolerated, and the road will be caught by provisions such as the definition in section 192 of the Road Traffic Act 1988:
Road .... means any highway and any other road to which the public has access... . As a result, many motoring offences can be committed in such roads. The highway authority s powers, however, will be much more limited, and section 130 of the Highways Act will not apply. Such roads may be on the way to becoming highways. But until they do the 20-year period under section 31(1) of the Highways Act will usually be determinative for this purpose the status of the road is reversible, since the owner can stop tolerating public use. Once the road is a highway, however, statutory power must be invoked to remove the public right of way: see below.
Does other legislation apply?
Thirdly, some private roads are neither highways nor subject to public access. Highway author- ities again have only limited powers. In some respects such roads are no different from the gen- erality of privately-owned land. But some legislation applies broadly to streets , thereby
including all classes of private road, the main example being the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991and other Acts which import its definition of street , including those which confer powers on statutory undertakers to carry out street works.
In practice, the division into categories is less neat. A private road which is not a carriageway (hence not subject to a public right of way for vehicular traffic) may have a footpath or bridle- way running along or across it. Or a private road may consist of a stretch which is a carriage- way and a stretch which is not. The question of whether a private road has become a highway through dedication and acceptance may be unclear and in dispute.
OwnershipThe ownership of a private road is quite often unknown. This is usually because the developer who laid out the site, perhaps fifty or a hundred years ago, lost interest in the road itself once he had sold off the houses he had built; and his successors in title are either untraceable or unwill- ing to get involved. Claiming title by adverse possession is not easy: the Land Registry is re- luctant to register possessory title to a private road, and the recent case of Simpson v. Fergus (2000) 79 P&CR 398 shows that this approach is well-justified. Here the Court of Appeal stressed the difficulty of adversely possessing parts of a road, since they cannot be fenced off. But frontagers may collectively be able to register title to all or most of the road by relying on the presumption that each owns half the width of the road along his or her frontage.
From A. W. & C. Barsby Legal Research and Publishing
