Depends where you are looking. I live slightly out of town, and the subdivision HOA does little more than road maintenance and snow plowing (so the HOA owns a plow truck and a tractor), trash service, maintenance of communal areas.
A nearby subdivision has no HOA and it must be a pain working out who's responsible for maintaining or snow plowing sections of road, with the answer from everyone probably being "not me", and everything is a mess.