Ownership and Maintenance

Who owns what roads? Who maintains what roads? Why is it important to know this information? Road ownership is important to many items, maintaining roadways, starting new projects, allocating funds, etc... Federal guidelines also require state departments of transportation to report on road ownership for HPMS requirements. This also plays into Certified Public Miles (CPM) and in addition are used for ARNOLD requirements. So much plays into ownership, this story map will discuss the nuances of ownership and what plays into it.

Road ownership, at it's root, is exactly what it sounds like. Who owns the roadway and where that ownership ends. In the view of HPMS, road ownership is most important in looking at the distinction between public and private ownership. While HPMS requires reporting on roads regardless of ownership, this plays into reporting of CPM and even the NHS. It also plays a role in many other data items needed for HPMS.

For HPMS purposes, ownership is reported for only public roadways. The word public refers to both ownership and the mobility of the roadway, rather than the ownership on its own. To be considered a public road, it must be owned or operated by a public authority, passable by a standard passenger car, and not be a gated private roadway. While publicly operated and owned is a staple of public roadways, this is not required to be a valid public roadway.

Different 'codes' provide descriptions on where ownership requirements change slightly For example, Code 1, State Highway Agency, means it must be owned by one of the 50 states, The District of Columbia, or the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, but code 2, County Highway Agency, represents county, local, municipal, town or township, owned or officially recognized governments established under state authority. There are more codes that require slightly different ownership validations.

Maintainership or Maintenance and Operations, Item 68, is just reporting of the legal entity that maintains and operates a roadway. Maintainership is really just who maintains the roadway. In many cases, this is the same as the owner of the roadway, however, there are times where is not the case and the maintainer is different from the owner. This is reported slightly different though, as maintenance is reported in full extent, inly where there is already collect data. This could be because of a county island, or where a roadway crossing boundaries. Regardless of this, it is still required to be reported on for HPMS purposes. This works in a similar way to ownership.

Ownership is reported in the HPMS report as Item 6. Ownership is reported in full extent for both rural and urban areas, for the National Highway System (NHS) and all functional classifications. Generally, this applies to only public roadways, however, privately owned roadways that are accessible to the public, must be reported on for ownership purposes. There can be multiple owners of a roadway, for instance, this road is owned by both city of Tempe and Maricopa County, this is because there is an overlap on the road itself. In this case, while there are two owners, only the primar should report on the shared segment. Additional owners can be itemized in the break down of the reporting. Another important component of reporting ownership, is that each direction of travel must be reported on for dual carriageway segments. In many other items, reporting takes place only in the cardinal direction (see RCI collection map for more on cardinality), however, with ownership, it must be collected on both sides of the road, cardinal and non cardinal, and in both directions of travel. We will see this apply to many other areas where ownership is needed.

Ownership has some rules for reporting. These rules apply, mostly, to what ownership is used for. To start, as discussed before, ownership is required for all public roads, which are roads that are publicly owned, passable be a standard passenger car and not a gated, private road. These are just basic rules for reporting ownership.

Another big area that is often misunderstood is when combining ownership and carriageways. Carriageways are the way GIS depicts roadways. A dual carriageway is how a divided highway is shown in GIS. When a roadway has a barrier of some kind that is at least 4 feet or wider, it is considered a divided highway, which is represented in a dual carriageway. For ownership reporting purposes, it is required to be reported on dual carriageways for divided highways. Dual carriageways, overall according to both ARNOLD and HPMS requirements, are not required on undivided highways, in full extent. Divided highways, in some cases, may be reported as a dual carriageway. This is really up to the state DOT's to decide, examples of this are if there may be a middle grassy median, this could be reported in a dual carriageway because police and fire could need to know if they could pass over the median if needed.

However, ownership directly feed into the Certified Public Miles (CPM), which must be reported as part of HPMS. CPM is the sum of all miles on all publicly owned roads that are passable with a standard passenger car. While the ownership maters for CPM, this more broken down into public versus private, not the exact owner of the road. Another distinction between the ownership reporting and what is used for CPM is cardinality and facility type. Only the cardinal direction is used in reporting CPM and on facility type 1 and 2 (one way and two way roads) are used for calculating CPM. Three main components play into ownership when reporting CPM, state-owned roads, non-state owned, and federally owned. Notice this is only three of the possible ownership reporting types that were discussed above. State owned roads is exactly how it sounds, they are roads that are owned and maintained by the state DOT. Non-state owned roads are those that by the local agencies, which are estimated for CPM. Federally owned roads are those owned by the federal government. This can be native lands, or federal roadways. Each year the Federal Highways Administration delivers a report for the state agencies on how much federally owned miles exist. This is added to the states CPM for the grand total, but taken out for apportionment purposes.

Another area that plays into ownership its the ARNOLD requirements. These are the All Roads Network of Linear Referencing and require all roads to be represented spatially in the GIS. The big area where ARNOLD incorporated ownership is in unifying local and private roads, where there may not have been represented data. There are many reasons why this is important in the scope of ownership; results in a more accurate representation of mileage, supports more GIS enabled work and has proven beneficial to E-911 by providing location based on information on local areas that were not previously available. This makes it possible to retrieve crash data on local roads that was geographically reference.

Ownership is necessary for reporting on several other HPMS items, in addition to CPM. Facility type, which is the operational characteristics of a roadway, requires ownership as a mechanism to reporting particular roadways. With Facility types 1 and 2, roads are reported in conjunction with ownership, facility type 3-7, ownership is not important. Ownership is also used for validating the National Highway System, as know the ownership of a roadway is important on whether or not it qualifies for the NHS system. It is also required to be reported as a part of all federal highways in each state.

Now that you see how much ownership is used, it is important that ownership records are correct and validated across the state. If you have question about the owner or maintainer of a road, or have an update on ownership, visit the ADOT AZGeo Change Request tool.

This tool will allow you to, validate ownership, request a change of ownership and see the CPM for an area. Please see contacts below to get assistance for this tool.

Still having trouble understanding what ownership is and how is it reported? Reach out to the Arizona Department of Transportation, Multi-Modal Planning Division for further explanation.

If you would like more information about the different variables required for HPMS and other transportation reporting, feel free to visit the  Data Analytics section website   or another related story map below:

 Certified Public Miles (CPM) 

 Federal Functional Classification (FFC) 

 Highway Performance Monitoring System (HPMS) 

 Lane Miles Vs. Maintenance Lane Miles 

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