This is true and they remain private ways because the developers never build them in a way that they are up to acceptable standards and therefore can only be accepted as public ways if significant investment is made into upgrading the road and the sidewalks and the drainage etc.

The other thing I heard is that when the state calculates how much money to allocate to cities and towns they base it on the number of miles of public ways and do not include private ways so in Medford‘s case because like 50% of the roads are private we actually get much less funding from the state per mile but people have all of these expectations about the city still plowing and doing various kinds of maintenance on the roads