Driveway setbacks and limits in Dalton

What is the five foot reserve?

The rule that decides how wide your driveway can actually be, and it is measured from somewhere people do not expect.

Section 5-6-2 of the Unified Zoning Ordinance is headed Five-Foot Reserve. It says no entrance or exit shall be so constructed that any part of it sits less than five feet from the boundaries. Those boundaries are defined in the section before it, and they are not your property lines.

Section 5-6-1 draws them by taking the point where your property lines meet the right of way lines, and projecting forward from there to the roadway surface or the curb, perpendicular to the axis of the highway. Those projected lines are the boundaries.

The practical result is simple even though the definition is not. Five feet clear at each side means ten feet in total, so the width available for a driveway is your frontage minus ten feet. On a hundred foot lot that leaves ninety and nobody notices. On a fifty foot lot it leaves forty.

There is one allowance in the same section. The returns, meaning the flares where the drive widens to meet the road, may extend to the boundary line and become tangent to it, but may not extend beyond it. That is why a properly built approach looks wider at the street than the five foot rule first suggests.

How many driveways can one lot have?

Two below two hundred feet of frontage. One at fifty feet or less.

Section 5-6-3 is titled Number of Driveways Authorized and it is short. No more than two combined entrances and exits are allowed to any parcel whose frontage is less than two hundred feet. Where frontage is fifty feet or less, only one combined entrance and exit is permitted, and its width may not exceed the frontage.

Above two hundred feet you may apply for additional entrances, but the ordinance requires you to show actual requirements of convenience and necessity. That is a real application rather than a formality.

The consequence that matters most: a circular driveway needs two cuts, so it is unavailable on a lot of fifty feet of frontage or less. Not as a matter of cost, as a matter of permission.

The mill village streets north west of downtown were platted around 1900, before cars, with the narrow frontages that implies. That is where this rule does most of its work, and it is the answer a lot of Crown Mill owners are looking for without finding it published anywhere.

What happens on a corner lot?

The first twenty five feet of both frontages are unavailable.

Two sections say the same thing from different directions. Section 5-6-5, Sight Distance, states that no portion of an entrance or exit drive shall enter the right of way at a point less than twenty five feet from the intersection of the right of way lines or street property lines. Section 3-4-3 says driveway access on a lot with frontage on more than one road shall not be located within twenty five feet of the intersection of any right of way lines.

The purpose is visibility at the junction, which is reasonable. The effect on a project is that the approach gets pushed toward the far end of whichever frontage you use.

Sometimes that costs nothing. Sometimes it adds a substantial run of concrete to reach the garage, and at $8 to $16 a square foot that shows up in the total.

The choice of which street to come off is usually still open at the quote stage. It is worth deciding deliberately rather than defaulting to the obvious one, because on a corner lot the two frontages can give very different answers.

Is there a maximum width?

Fifty feet at the road, and a minimum angle of forty five degrees.

Section 5-6-4, Driveway Design, caps the width of any entrance or combined entrance and exit at fifty feet, measured parallel with the roadway. Where the road is on a curve the measurement is taken parallel with the tangent at the point where the centre line of the driveway crosses the curb or the edge of pavement.

The same section sets the angle. A driveway may not meet the edge of the road at less than forty five degrees. On divided highways there are separate figures for roadside commercial entrances and exits.

Fifty feet is generous for a house and it is a real ceiling for a wide parking apron. Anything broader than that has to sit behind the frontage rather than opening directly onto the road, which is the standard way around it: a normal width approach at the street that opens out into a parking area further in.

That works because article 5-6 governs where a driveway meets the public road. Behind that point the rules stop applying.

How do you check your own lot?

Measure the frontage first, then work through the four numbers.

Frontage is the distance across the front of your lot along the road. Take that figure and subtract ten feet, and you have the width available for an entrance. If the figure is fifty feet or less, you get one driveway and its width cannot exceed the frontage. If it is a corner lot, mark twenty five feet back from the intersection on both frontages and rule that out.

Anything above fifty feet at the road is out regardless of how much frontage you have, and the approach has to meet the road at forty five degrees or more.

Between them those numbers settle the shape of the job before anyone quotes it. A contractor who works in Dalton will answer all four without checking. One who has to look them up is not disqualified, but you now know which conversation you are having.