Legal Road V Physical Road

The Legal Road layer under the Legal Group often has a different location to the Road layers found under the Transport tab. There are a number of factors contributing to this:

Physical road is different to legal road. Topographic roads under the Topo Group are the centrelines of roads that physically exist, whereas Legal Roads under the Legal Group are roads that have been defined on paper, but do not necessarily physically exist. The Road layer under the Legal Group usually (but not always) describes legal road. Legal Road layer may be useful, for example, as a quick reference as to where the legal access to properties exists, and Topo Road Layer to show where the physical access is. Note that QuickMap should not be used as the authoritative record of road legality. A land expert such as a registered surveyor should be consulted to provide advice on whether or not a road is legal.

Legal roads are updated more frequently than Topo roads. In areas of new subdivisions this may mean that roads appear in the Legal road layer but not in the Topo road layer

Topo road is not as accurate as Legal road. Topo roads have cartographic characteristics/considerations. LINZ originally compiled NZTopo for the 1:50:000 scale National Topographic Map Series. Legal roads are derived from survey records such as Survey Plans, or Digitised from record sheets ranging in scale between 1:396 and 1:50,000.