I live in a place that is also off a private road and the solution that was come up with was "like" an HOA, but just maintains the actual road. They collected 10K, and then dropped the yearly collection to $125/year. 11 houses on this road. Because yes, road repairs are very expensive. At one point, they were looking at 45K to get the road just functioning until they convinced the city to take like 100 feet of it under their control