The Old Town Road and Parcels
“I’m gonna take my horse
To the old town road
I’m gonna ride ’til I can’t no more” Lil Nas X
One of my earliest memories of working with parcel maps in rural Wisconsin were the disappearing roads or the “go ’til you can’t no more” roads. Of course, the roads weren’t disappearing but the dedicated or purchased rights of ways that stood as separate parcels did. In agricultural (rural) areas the parcels were described as continuous adjoining lands with prescriptive right roads along the property lines. Farm-to-town, farm-to-market, or ranch-to-market roads were established on property lines, at various widths to move agricultural goods from production point to market.
Maintenance and property tax classification of the rural roads varies by state. What started as locally important travel ways carrying localized traffic have grown into important connections serving tourism, recreation, school bus routing, oil and gas services, timber, and many other economic sectors. Depending on the state maintenance could be town, county, or state; the land under the road could be taxable or exempted; load permitting could be local or state managed; and road mile tracking for gas tax allocation can be local, county, or state.
Parcel mapping for roads and road rights of way is further complicated when transportation, tax mapping, and landownership business needs collide on the same map product. The transportation applications need the traveled way, pavement conditions, intersection connections, road names, directionality, asset management, road appliances (signs, bridges, culverts, etc.), and traffic. Tax mapping needs to reflect the taxable lands shown in the assessment and on the property tax bill. Landownership needs boundaries and legal descriptions with ties to conveyance and survey documents. These uses don’t even sound like the same product.
Add business needs for land use control (zoning), administrative boundaries (cities, school districts, etc.), and public services and the usefulness of the multiuse parcel map is further misleading. Does the local zoning ordinance boundary call out the road or the property line? Is the city or town boundary defined to the road centerline or the property boundary or some other reference? How many times do garbage trucks drive the same road on different days because of jurisdictional boundaries? Have you ever been on a country road where one lane is repaved and the other is crumbling?
To add one more confusion, how many parcel mappers have citizens point out that the parcel map is not accurate because it doesn’t reflect their understand of their landownership boundaries or the tax legal description is not the same as the one on their deed? And a corollary to these questions is why doesn’t the parcel map match the google images on my phone? That tree is or isn’t on my land, but your map is wrong.
I am going to address the “types of parcel maps” under the Using Parcel Data heading
(https://medium.com/parcels-and-land-records/tagged/parcel-apps) For this discussion, let’s look at the old time road from the road rights of way perspective.
Also, as a stick in the sand the following conventions are used, no hyphens, not capitalized.
Right of way — a single occurrence of the right to use the land of another.
Rights of way — the plural collection of the single occurrences.
Right of ways — a mistake in this context.
Rights of ways — another mistake, too many plurals.
Road Rights of Ways
These are lands used for transportation. Rights of way exist for water ways, conservation, railroads, communication, utilities, and myriad of other defined limited uses. For this discussion we will look at road rights of way.
Purchased rights of ways — This is the result of a property transaction where land is conveyed for the purpose of a road. The land could be an outright purchased by a transportation department. Condemnation may precede purchase and may be a part of a road right of way transaction. Purchased rights of way are typically represented plats or surveys, which may or may not be recorded, but are often on file at the owning transportation department.
Dedicated rights of way — Dedications are often represented on a plat. The developer or landowner conveys through dedication parts of subdivision to a public entity for transportation.
Prescriptive rights of way — This may be a local use of the legal term prescriptive. These rights of way are obtained through sustained public use, such as the farm to market roads, have open and uninterrupted use, and if abandoned for road use would revert to the adjoining landowners. That is, these are rights of way that are not documented individually and therefore may be much more challenging to legally describe and map.
Rights of way acquired by a public agency are part of the public land assets of the agency. Prescriptive rights of way are a temporary use, more like an easement. The assignment of liabilities, assignment of rights for other uses such as utility or recreation, and exact extent can be uncertain with prescriptive rights of way.
The representations of the various forms of the rights of way on the parcel map will dictate if the roads are obvious on the parcel map. The purpose of parcel map and intended representations will dictate how these types of rights of way are shown.
1. The prescriptive rights of ways may be shown with dashed lines and not mapped as polygons.
2. There may be no indication of prescriptive rights of way.
3. A separate polygon is mapped for each piece of a prescriptive right of way on each parcel, which would be three polygons in the image above.
4. A less common approach is to have all the prescriptive rights of way as a single polygon.
