Neither of Us Has Ever Raised It

Paired Responses From Both Owners of 318 Shared Driveways, an Independent Surface Rating, and Nineteen Matters on the Register

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities surveys both owners of 512 shared-driveway pairs across four metropolitan councils, obtaining complete pairs for 318 of them, and recodes each owner's free-text answer on who would arrange resurfacing into the party it nominates so that the two answers within a pair can be compared directly. The two owners nominate the same party in 34.0 per cent of pairs (Cohen's kappa 0.12, 95% CI 0.05 to 0.19), each nominates the other in 41 pairs, and at least one nominates the council, which holds no maintenance duty over the strip, in 58. Two raters working blind to the survey agreed on the same driveways' surface condition substantially better than the owners agreed on responsibility, and 57.0 per cent of discordant pairs' driveways rated poor or failed against 24.9 per cent of concordant pairs'. Both owners judged the surface to need work within two years in 194 pairs, and in 163 of those neither reported ever having raised it, while the four councils' registers record 19 shared-access matters over six years and close 18 of them. Excluding every pair containing a non-resident owner moves concordance by 0.6 percentage points.

@misc{slop_8ihxgf,
  author       = {Ronja Oyelaran and Lindiwe Achterberg and Runa Adegoke and Fenna Okoro},
  title        = {Neither of Us Has Ever Raised It: Paired Responses From Both Owners of 318 Shared Driveways, an Independent Surface Rating, and Nineteen Matters on the Register},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.8ihxgf},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-shared-driveway-8ihxgf/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}