Thousands of discontinued and abandoned roads crisscross the state of Maine, many traversing long-forgotten and overgrown forests and fields.

Hundreds of those once-public roads have led to lawsuits over who can use them and if they still even count as roads. Those disputes often pit public interest against private landownership, sometimes costing taxpayers thousands.

But how do these roads get abandoned or discontinued? What happens to them — and the people living there?

How do roads become discontinued or abandoned?

In Maine, there are three types of these roads:

• Discontinued roads have been officially declared so by a majority vote by a town meeting or a town council. Discontinuance means the town stops maintaining the road, but grants the public the right to use it: a public easement.

• Statutory abandonment happens when a town or city has not maintained a road for at least 30 years, turning that former road automatically into a public easement.

• Common law abandonment occurs when the public has not used the road for 20 years — the “public” in this case not including the landowners that use the road to access their property. Under common law abandonment, no public easement is created, and ownership reverts to the abutting landowners.

So … what’s the problem?

The retention of a public easement is at the center of the issue.

Public easements are stretches of land — often an abandoned or discontinued road — that allow “unfettered” public access. Think walking, hiking, driving, snowshoeing. It’s all allowed on public easements, for anyone at any time.

But nobody has a legal responsibility to maintain those public easements. Towns and cities can discontinue or abandon a road to create a permanent right to public access, but by doing so, they shirk the responsibility to keep those roads up to the state standard of “safe and convenient for travelers with motor vehicles.”

In most cases, that means residents who live on that discontinued or abandoned road have to maintain the road at their own cost, just to be able to drive to their home.

A 1971 Maine Supreme Judicial Court case, Jordan v. Canton, declared a similar situation to be unconstitutional.

The case involved “limited-user highways,” which were created by the state Legislature to essentially serve the same purpose as a public easement: public access but no public maintenance. The court said this combination will cause the inevitable destruction of the road, and limits access for abutting property owners. Without a provision to pay those property owners for their lost property access, the court said, limited-user highways unjustly “took” property rights away from residents.

Meanwhile, public easements, which also allow public use without a responsibility for public maintenance, are still allowed in Maine. In fact, they are very common. In the 1,200-person town of Fayette alone, abandoned roads expert Roberta Manter estimates there are 20 public easements.

How do I know if my road is discontinued or abandoned?

Well, that’s the thing: It’s often difficult to tell.

Discontinuances weren’t required to be reported to the Maine Department of Transportation and Registry of Deeds until 2015, and evidence of abandonment is not often documented because of its gradual nature. Sellers of residential property weren’t required to inform buyers of the status of their road until 2017, and they weren’t required to inform buyers of who maintains the road until 2023.

Road status can also change several times over a long period, and there’s no statewide database for abandoned and discontinued roads. Even the two types of abandoned roads can be at odds, with abutters claiming ownership of a road after 20 years of no public use and towns claiming a public easement after 30 years of no public maintenance.

Many towns don’t keep an inventory of their own roads, and about 300 Maine towns have roads with contested status, according to Manter’s research.

In most disputes, it’s the very status of the road itself that is in question: Is it a public easement, private property or a public road?

The answer to that question pits the interests of landowners against the public’s use of the road. And in at least 100 cases in the last half-century, those competing interests have led to lawsuits, which can be costly for individual residents and for the towns — and therefore taxpayers.