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.