Hello, Allison P!
My name is Gaurav and I’m a mapper in the OSM team at Lyft.
Thank you for your message. I added the access=private tag to the newly added road because the access=private tag was already present on the existing adjacent road (https://pewu.github.io/osm-history/#/way/13755330). There is no evidence to add or modify the access tag. Since we do not practice removing existing access tags without proper evidence that's why I decided to add access=private tag to the newly added road 
Best regards!
