Is my Gloucester street public or private?

Four in ten miles of Gloucester road are private, more than half of its named streets. Type your street to see whether the city or the owners along it are responsible for repairs, how many crashes and pothole reports it has, when it was last paved if anyone has a record, and what to do about it. Every Gloucester street, public and private, is in the table below.

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The city by the numbers

Every street in Gloucester

Filter by public, private or state, type part of a name, click a column heading to sort, or download the whole table. Click any street for its full card and to tell us when it was last paved.

What the city will and will not do on a private road

The four ways a private road gets fixed

1. The neighbors pay a contractor. Get several bids and split the cost. Nothing goes through City Hall. There is no way to make a holdout pay.
2. The neighbors form a road association. It collects money, hires the contractor and keeps a schedule. With covenants recorded on every deed it can require each owner to pay, as the Association of Eastern Point Residents has since 1962. Without them it works only as long as everyone agrees.
3. A betterment through the city. At least 75 percent of the abutting owners sign a petition from the City Clerk and pay $1 a foot, capped at $500. DPW estimates the job. At a meeting called by certified mail, 75 percent must attend and two thirds must vote yes. The mayor sends it to the council, which needs a two thirds vote. The city borrows and builds, and each parcel repays an equal share on its tax bill over five years (shares under $3,000) or ten years, at 5 percent interest or up to 2 points over the city's borrowing rate. The road stays private. If the vote fails, wait two years.
4. The city accepts the road as public. Petition the council to lay it out as a public way. The council weighs whether the road connects public roads or places, carries through traffic, is the fastest route for fire trucks, can hold utilities, is wide enough, and whether the abutters agree. Acceptance is a taking, so the city may widen the road and take land along it.

A fifth path is pending. In August 2025 the council voted 9 to 0 to ask the Legislature for a special act that would let the city spend public money on private roads with at least ten tax paying homes that connect public roads or lead to public places and carry mostly through traffic. Read the full story: Is your Gloucester street public or private?

Your turn

Get the data

Everything on this page is yours to download and reuse. The Download CSV button above gives every street with its status, miles, crashes, reports and paving on record. The full package, with MassDOT's 2025 pavement ratings, every road project we found, town road spending since 2024 and SeeClickFix counts by street for Gloucester and Rockport, is on Data and Tools: Cape Ann roads. The raw file this page reads is gloucester_streets.json.

How we built it: street status comes from MassDOT's Road Inventory (accepted, unaccepted or state owned) checked against the City of Gloucester's street list of Jan. 11, 2023, which is the legal reference and splits some streets into public and private sections. Where the two disagree the card says so. Crashes are MassDOT crash records since Jan. 1, 2023, counted by the road named in the police report; 2024 and later are preliminary. Reports are road related SeeClickFix reports since Nov. 2025. "Year last improved" is MassDOT's own field and is blank for most streets. Paving on record is city votes and records we verified, plus reader reports after we check them against city records and aerial photos. Corrections: [email protected]. See the Roads Library for every study and plan behind this.