Philadelphia County is the city itself, and its driveways are unlike anywhere else we work. Few front drives, a great many rear ones, a lot of them shared, and a street system where the curb and the footway belong to rules written for a dense city. This page covers where we go, the ground, and the rules that apply when work reaches the street.
The whole city, with most driveway work falling where houses have them: the Far Northeast (Somerton, Bustleton, Fox Chase, Parkwood, Torresdale, Morrell Park), the lower Northeast (Mayfair, Tacony, Holmesburg, Oxford Circle, Rhawnhurst), the Northwest (Roxborough, Manayunk, Andorra, Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy), and the lots and courts of the older river wards and South Philadelphia. If your street is not named, send it anyway.
Philadelphia sits on the Fall Line, the edge where the hard rock of the Piedmont meets the flatter sands and gravels of the Atlantic Coastal Plain. The Schuylkill drops over it at Fairmount. North and west of that line the city climbs, to about 446 feet at Chestnut Hill, its highest point, and the streets of Manayunk and Roxborough run up slopes steep enough that a driveway there is as much about stopping water as parking a car. Down along the Delaware the land is low and level.
That split shows up in driveways. On the hills, runoff comes down the drive every time it rains, finds the lowest edge and undercuts it, so drainage and edge support matter more than surface color. On the flat ground the problem reverses: water has nowhere to go and sits in shallow dips, where it freezes in winter and opens whatever crack runs through the dip. The creeks that cut across the city, the Wissahickon, the Pennypack, the Tacony and the Poquessing along the northeast border, mark the valleys where the slope changes fastest.
The Northeast. Block after block of rows built with a garage in the basement or at the back, reached from a driveway that runs behind the row. Those driveways are shared, sometimes by a dozen houses or more, and they carry every car on the block twice a day. They wear in predictable places: the turn in from the side street, the inlet, and the stretch in front of the busiest garages.
The Northwest. Older twins and detached houses on slopes, with drives that are short, steep and hemmed in by stone walls and mature trees. Roots, shade and runoff are the three things that decide how long the asphalt lasts.
The older wards. Where there is asphalt at all it is usually a rear pad, a church or school lot, or a court shared by a handful of properties. Access is the main constraint: a paving machine and a roller cannot always get in, and a lot of the work is by hand.
The Streets Department states that sidewalks, alleys, driveways and retaining walls are private property, that the City does not own or maintain them, and that all owners with deed rights to use a shared alley or driveway must share the cost of repairs or rebuilding, even if only part of it needs work. If your rear driveway has potholes, nobody from the City is coming to fix them. It is a job for the owners on the row, together.
Sealing and crack filling a driveway on your own property does not touch the curb or footway. Anything that does is quoted with the permit named and the fee as it stands at the time.
The City's rule is that owners with deed rights share the cost. How you settle that between neighbors is yours to decide, but the job itself works best done end to end. We will price the whole run and each share so everyone sees the same numbers.
That is runoff, not wear. Sealing will not stop it. The quote will say whether the edge needs rebuilding and whether the water can be turned somewhere safer.
Sealing and crack filling on your own property is not curb or footway work. The permits on this page come in when the job reaches the sidewalk, the curb or the curb cut.
Across the line: Montgomery County to the north and west, Delaware County past Cobbs Creek, Bucks County past the Poquessing.
