Road jurisdiction disputes

[DSS5]

Inspired by this local story - http://www.hcpress.com/news/whats-going-onat-pothole-paradise-tax-office-ncdot-owns-portion-of-poorly-maintained-pride-drive.html:

Regarding the section of Pride Drive where KFC and High Country Host have road frontage, Morganton-based Fulenwider Enterprises, which operates the KFC, and the N.C. Department of Transportation, which owns the property of High Country Host, own to the centerline of the first portion of Pride Drive...This section has humungous potholes that look more like craters.

A local spokesman with NCDOT said the department doesn't own any portion of Pride Drive, and Clay Brown, district manager with Fulenwider Enterprises, said the same thing. "We've been through this before," Brown said. "If we have any responsibility for it, I don't know it."

The middle stretch of Pride Drive is in the vicinity of Ride With Pride car wash and Kmart. This section, which is owned entirely by those associated with Ride With Pride car wash, is nicely paved...

The last portion of Pride Drive...is owned by Mark Hagle of Siler Crossing Limited Partnership. This final section of Pride Drive is also in treacherous shape...Siler Crossing Limited Partnership pretty much only owns pavement of Pride Drive.

Are there any similar stories where a dispute over who has jurisdiction over a road has caused it to fall in disrepair, perhaps with a more heavily trafficed street?

[wxfree]

I know of a dead-end county road that was thought to be private that had fallen into disrepair in the 90s.  The residents petitioned for county maintenance, and when the records were searched it was found that it was a designated county road, forgotten years ago since for a long time no one lived out there.  The county improved it to a gravel road, and it's now paved.

[mUtcd33]

Pennsylvania has a lot of them, just recently Whitehall Township in Lehigh County was just in a dispute with PENNDOT over whose job it was to beautify MacArthur Road (Which is a four-lane "Jersey freeway" and arterial road clearly signed as SR-145) and last spring West Penn Township in Schuylkill County got into trouble by using some surplus "Keep Right" and "NO-U-Turn" signs at the intersection of PA-309 (four-lane arterial) and PA-443 (Clamtown Rd.). The townships excuse was something along the lines of "well, we had extras, so you might as well use them to improve safety within our borders". The signs are from a private contractor, and are not sized for a four-lane highway so PENNDOT wasn't too happy...

[corco]

Yeah we've got several places in our county where either A) the county still owns the right of way but is unofficially privately maintained (my county is the size of Delaware, and has basically 4,000 (7,000 officially, but 3,000 are in the state prison) people with very little taxable income- so a lot of the more remote county roads that just serve one or two houses just don't get maintained), which leads to interesting kerfuffles sometimes or B) nobody knows who maintains the road.

[roadman65]

I know that there were issues with signing on the Garden State Parkway in Union, NJ southbound at US 22.  The ramps for US 22 (and NJ 82) had substandard signage for years because both the NJDOT (who had jurisdiction south of US 22 before 1987) and the then NJ Highway Authority (now part of the NJ Turnpike Authority) had it north of there.  I believe that both NJDOT and the NJHWA believed that each other should be the one's to maintain the signs and thus the poor signs and standards went for years.  Now its all one and the signs have been brought to standards except for Morristown still being control city for NJ  82 as it is no longer needed with the modern freeways of I-78 and NJ 24 nearby.  I-78 was completed during that stand off period as NJ 82 WB to NJ 24 WB was the way to go back then.

[cu2010]

In St. Lawrence County, all bridges on public highways (excepting those on NYSDOT roads) are maintained by the county Department of Highways.

As such, there is currently an ownership dispute tying up much-needed repairs on a pair of spans over the Oswegatchie River near Gouverneur. The longer span, maintained by the county, is in top shape, while the shorter span, crossing a hydroelectric dam, is a deteriorating wooden span in need of replacement. Neither the county nor the dam company want ownership of the bridge...the county feels that the dam company, whose property the bridge lies on, not county right-of-way, is responsible for it, and thus should pay for repairs. The dam company, on the other hand, feels that they shouldn't have to maintain a bridge on a public road, and feels that the burden thus lies on the county. The fact that St. Lawrence County is in severe financial trouble doesn't help matters any.

The issue has come into public light over the last few years, as a federal relicensing of the hydroelectric project did not include maintenance of the bridge. A later FERC ruling upheld the agreement. The county is bringing the issue to the state Supreme Court, hoping a judge will end the dispute...in the meantime, the county and the Town of Fowler have collaborated on short-term repairs until a long-term solution is reached.

[Urban Prairie Schooner]

In the parish where I live, over time maintenance responsibility for some nominally private roads (usually in the rural part of the parish) has become muddled as the parish would sometimes perform necessary maintenance when no one else would. This led to battles between the property owners and the parish department of public works as to who actually owns the road - the property owners want the parish to have responsibility, the parish not so much. The current policy, when a new private road is created, is to specifically notate on the final subdivision plat that the parish has no responsibility for the road.