Talk:Right-of-way

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

WikiProject Disambiguation This page is part of WikiProject Disambiguation, an attempt to structure and organize all disambiguation pages on Wikipedia. If you wish to help, you can edit the page attached to this talk page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.

[edit] Kind of a mess

This page is kind of a mess.

There isn't a page that just describes right-of-way on the road. It's split across a couple different pages, and those pages are in flux and might change. See Talk:Rules_of_the_road#"Serious_revamp" for more on that. If the anchors change those links are gonna fail.

In the UK rights-of-way are public access paths or dirt roads, but there's no one page that describe them. See Footpath (right of way), Bridleway, Byway (road). I can't find comparable for the US but Donald P. Hodel states "...that disused dirt roads and footpaths could be considered right-of-ways under RS 2477." I can't find much on RS 2477 but here's some info http://www.rs2477roads.com/

While I've been disambig'ing mostly I've seen right-of-way used interchangably with easement, but sometimes a distinction is made. Sometimes it refers to the easement, sometimes it refers to the road, sometimes it even seems to refer to the road bed (or railroad bed, e.g. "The Wuppertal monorail...is the only surviving monorail to actually use a single rail as the means of contact with its right-of-way.").

Easement says "Historically, it was limited to the right-of-way and rights over flowing waters, although this is no longer true." Many of the light rail pages use the phrase "...private right-of-way..." (e.g. Green Line "E" Branch) but I'm not sure how that's supposed to be different that a regular (non-private?) right-of-way.

Triborough Bridge has the confusing sentence "a complex of three bridges....using what were two islands...as intermediate right-of-way between the water crossings. "

Ewlyahoocom 21:32, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

The word "verge" has a meaning "a grass border along a road"[1] but I cna't find a wiki page that covers it. Some uses of "right of way" are synonymous with that meaning. Ewlyahoocom 07:48, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
A private right-of-way is an easement belonging to a specific individual or entity (such as a railroad). A public right-of-way belongs to the public. A railroad with a private ROW can prevent others (such as other railroads or pedestrians) from using that ROW. A public ROW is open to all members of the public, but certain types of usage (such as motorized vehicles) might be regulated or banned.
A public ROW is an implied easement, and is in the realm of common-law (in the US and I presume UK) and is therefore murky. Private ROWs can be either express or implied. An implied ROW is created when people openly travel across land for a certain period of time and the property owner does nothing to prevent them. If the travellers are members of the general public, then a public ROW is created. If the traveller is a specific individual, such a neighbor, then a private ROW is created. The legal details vary widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction (and IANAL). In areas of the US that were settled early, most roads are built on implied ROWs on private land. An express ROW is explicitly granted by the property owner and is accompanied by legal documentation which details such things as the route, the width of the ROW and who has access. The details of an implied ROW, if contentious, can only be settled through a lawsuit.
In the US an implied public ROW by default "belongs" to the lowest level of local government (county, town or city), meaning that it is responsible for continued maintenance of the ROW, although it can transfer that responsibility to other levels of government (such as when a town road becomes a state highway). Maintenence has to be sufficent to permit historical usage, meaning that a footpath only has to be maintained as a footpath, a road used by vehicles has to be maintained for vehicular traffic. Again, this is common-law and is murky and variable. It is very difficult for a government to get rid of a ROW that it doesn't want to maintain anymore.
The US federal government does not recognize implied easements on land it owns (probably the same for Crown lands in Canada and Australia). That's where RS 2477 comes in - It was a US federal statute giving ROW for the construction of highways across federally-owned land, which was in force between 1866 and 1976. It did not require any further permission or the filing of any paperwork, so it functioned sort of like an implied ROW.
In US highway usage, right-of-way refers to the easement itself and to the land subject to the easement. I can't speak to railroad usage. Toiyabe 20:51, 25 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Easements

In English law -- from which the term easement derives there are many forms of right of way which are not easements, for example highways, footpaths and so on. An easement can only exist to benefit another plot of land it cannot exist for the benefit of a group of people or the general public. It may be that that distinction has been lost in (eg) the US, but its still very real here. It is therefore wrong for this page to muddle the two as if they are really the same sort of thing actually. Francis Davey 14:16, 31 July 2007 (UTC)

I re-iterate that point. Rights of Way are only a subspecies of easement in *some* jurisdictions (I believe the US) thus this page is POV and needs editing. One solution would be to remove all references to easement from it. Shall I do that or is there another way? Francis Davey 12:03, 3 September 2007 (UTC)