Paper Roads - Case Studies

We recently had an example of a paper road situation which highlights some pertinent points. This example involved two farmers who farmed either side of a paper road. The road was unformed and fenced with one fence that was placed in a convenient physical place. This fence jumped from one side of the paper road to the other on a couple of occasions with the paper road area being approximately grazed evenly between the farmers. One of the farmers was very interested in stopping this road permanently as he was concerned about the public utilizing their rights of access. The others farmer was unconcerned by public use and was prepared to ignore it.

The road did not lead to anywhere of particular interest which made the process of stopping the road easier as paper roads that lead to areas of public domain such as forest/national parks or rivers/lakes are far more likely to strike objections during the notification process. The farmer that wanted the road closed was prepared to pay for the process and therefore incorporated the area of the road into his existing farm with the new boundary and fence lying on the far side of the old road. If both farmers had wanted to contribute to the stopping the new boundary could have been positioned where the existing fence was, with the cost being apportioned based on the area on either side of the fence. This may have been an overall cheaper option as the fence could have remained but again this depends on the condition and position of the fence. 

Our second case study was significantly more confrontational. In this example, a member of the public wandered into the office one day wanting to utilize our services to locate either side of a paper road that lead to a private hunting block that he partially owned.

Unfortunately the paper road dissected a significant rural station and the owner of the station and the potential client had had a number of verbal clashes over his plans. The owner of the hunting block wanted to create a track access over the paper road so that hunters could drive to the block. Unfortunately for the block owner the paper road had not been positioned in the most physically logical place. This is common with many a paper road, and in this case the paper road had places where it travelled directly over major bluffs. This meant that even if we had located the road for the block owner on the ground the use of the road would have been limited to the legal road position and therefore in positions was impractical. The other deterring factor was the survey cost as the documented information locating the road was very old and would have taken significant time to decipher and mathematically plot. As a result, the block owner is no closer to gaining access in this direction and has his bulldozer idling.