Paper street

[2][3] Commercial street maps based only on official subdivision and land records may show streets which are legally public rights of way though usually undriveable.

[4] They are especially common in New Zealand, where they were created primarily for future access in rural areas (though in some cases, their layout was determined without checking whether the topography was acceptable for a road).

[5] An estimated 56,000 km (35,000 mi) of paper road exists in New Zealand.

Paper streets (and, by extension, paper towns) may be deliberately included in published maps as trap streets, forming a copyright trap.

A play on the phrase is found in Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club, as well as the film based on that book, where the protagonist lives in a house on "Paper street".

The reservoir in this plan was built. The streets existed legally but were never built.
This road near Te Uku Wind Farm was started about 1896 and was part formed when construction stopped about 1914. It drops through a rock cutting about 300 metres long, 3 metres wide and up to 3 metres deep.
These extracts from a Walking Access Commission map of the area in the photo above, illustrate the extent of paper and actual roads (purple), compared to actual roads only (map on right).