NZ Cadastral Road Network

June 2010 BDE extract Cadastral road centrelines are the centreline of the cadastral vested parcels used to attach official road names and address numbers for electoral roll purposes. They are not the carriageway or formed roads, see the Topo road centrelines for those.

Many rural roads have been formed and straightened far from the legal right of way and councils have avoided the costs of resurvey by not doing it. So in most cases everyone is technically trespassing outside urban areas.

While some of these named roads may be only tracks, unformed, abandoned, closed or cross an unbridged river or closed railway crossing, these are not what is known as 'paper roads'. Paper roads do not even have official names or cadastral centrelines. See the Corax roadrail parcel polygons for paper roads and named roads.

Because road names are needed for address number allocation some road centrelines are private and cross private parcels rather than vested parcels. These are tagged as NONCADRD = "Y".

There are no transport attributes on these, but the road names are verified and the official names have unique locality/suburb names, some councils have gazetted them so they are also official. Because this is the official source of new vested roads updated monthly, this is the set that is used by all other routable datasets to add new roads.

The road names are parsed, abbreviated and combined to make labelling and searching easier. Priority 1 roads are selected with the preferred name. Alternate names such as State Highway are in 'other name' but it does not define a highway legally. None should be recoded as Null or a blank string.

Accuracy: All locations are the centre of the right of way or road casing. The road casing is accurate for 95% of the coordinates to 0.02 metres in urban areas and 20 m in remote rural areas based on survey requirements. The accuracy of the attributes and completeness is likely to be very high because they are actively maintained. Roads crossing suburbs are not split by suburb name. A road has only one locality (suburb name) even if it is a suburb boundary. Different suburbs on each side of the road are not recorded. The field name says it all - a locality - not a suburb and is only there to disambiguate duplicate road names.

Sourced from the Bulk Data Extract from LINZ, June 2010. The road names are joined from the Authoritative Streets and Places (ASP) database.