property. The owners of the property are obliged to hold a share in the private road that they use.
Share-holders have a duty to pay with their own money for the construction and maintenance of the private
road, known as road maintenance. A private road is cared for by
a road maintenance association, which is a
special and possibly
even unique arrangement which, just like private roads themselves,
have remained
unchanged in the way they are organised for decades. The same kind of model is in use in Sweden, however,
and it is from there that the Finnish model has been copied.
Although shareholders in the road are bound to pay for the maintenance of the road themselves, roads that
are deemed particularly important with regards to traffic and habitation receive grants from both the state and the
municipalities. It is often a prerequisite for receiving a grant, however, that a road maintenance association has
been established. A road maintenance association is advisable when there are many shareholders and the road
requires regular maintenance. Road and road maintenance associations are governed by the Private Road Act.
State assistance for private roads peaked at 35 million euros in the 1990s, but in 2016 only 8 million euros. The
figure in Sweden is close to 100 million euros.
Finland has a huge amount of private roads
– around 360,000 km – compare with the public road network
which is only 79,000 km in total. Around 100,000 km is connected
to permanent dwellings, 120,000 km is
comprised of forest roads and 110,000 km provide motor vehicles with access to forests and summer cottages.
Private roads that are considered important and fulfil the criteria for state funding comprise 55,000 km of the
network.
The Private Road Act (1963) governs most matters related to private roads. This was preceded by another
act which administered the roads in a way that was founded on public road laws
from the beginning of the
century. At that time public roads were at least partly the responsibility of local landowners, and they all had their
own shares of the duty. As Finland is such a sparsely inhabited country, these
roads have been both public
rights of way and paths to serve local residents.
Finland has a somewhat special summer-cottage tradition which has supported the need to administer private
roads while the rural population has been decreasing. There has been a need to travel on small roads in areas
that would otherwise be regarded as being wilderness.
Finland has been for a long time and is still today Europe’s most evenly inhabited country. Sweden, for
instance, is otherwise very much like Finland, but it’s population is clustered in villages, towns and cities, while in
Finland the inhabitants are more evenly scattered.
The Finnish Road Association’s book The Road Maintenance Association and Shareholders (2015) gives a
full description of the system. The book’s table of contents is a good starting point for understanding what the
road association is all about,
including road rights, road association administration,
the principles of sharing
duties, road association payments and funding organisations.
This has been a functional and democratic method that the old legal framework has supported for decades
already, although it has not been able to stop a number of conflicts and differences of opinion that are rooted in
common ownership. Having said that, however, the fact that the rules are regulated by law forms a good basis
for the system to function.
Private roads can be maintained with only around a third of the costs of public roads. A growth in the amount
of funding being awarded to private roads seems unavoidable because many private roads have become more
important with regards to traffic while a number of changes in the population and ways of earning a living have
made public roads quieter.
This means that the need to examine the borderline between public and private roads has increased, and it is
hoped that new innovations will be created in the process. The issues that will need to be considered are the
contracting and management of road maintenance and the role of local entrepreneurs.
The steps taken in recent years that have perhaps been most important concerned road managers.This
position was established in 2010. There are now around 200 part-time road managers, 150 of whom have their
own business.
Nowadays it is very much on the agenda to combine the maintenance of private and public roads to make the
whole process more rational and effective.
The idea is not, however, to find a single way of doing things, but
rather to find the most sensible concept for each individual situation. Often this
boils down to arranging the
maintenance work in a rational manner and developing the terms of the management contract.
