The article undertakes consideration of selected aspects of the reform of spatial planning in Poland through the amendment of the Planning Act of 7 July 2023. The author shows the reform on the backdrop of the historical development of planning regulations, and with particular emphasis on the issue of weighing public and private interests in spatial planning. The realization of the Planning Law’s values and consistent goals is a prerequisite for good plan design and successful implementation. Some of the amendments to the Planning Law including increasing public participation, or making procedures more charming as well as increasing digitization can contribute to the realization of values important for urban planning such as ensuring spatial order. Urban planning agreements are also an important instrument can become a tool for more fully realizing both public and private interests, especially they will be beneficial when the local administration cannot afford to enact a local plan or implement a public purpose investment, which can be financed as a complementary investment by private entities.

The study focuses on the legal status of publicly accessible internal roads not included in any of the categories of public roads, the legal separation of which is questioned. As a consequence, it happens that a private law entity is not only obliged to build publicly accessible roads but also to maintain them later, which is an example of de facto expropriation. And such a disproportion is unacceptable in the rule of law, which has been confirmed in the jurisprudence of the ECHR, whose theses are still ignored in Polish law. The source of the problem is the formal rather than material definition of public roads. Meanwhile, it is the latter perspective that makes it possible to understand the essence of internal roads that perform the same function as public roads. The article presents the thesis that whether a road is a public road or an internal road is determined not only by the formal classification to a given category of public roads, but also by its actual use.