Here's a fun one.....

City decides to finally re-pave the road in front of my house... They come in and grind up the road, and then regrade the road, leaving all the material in place, not removing the old blacktop. Then they are going to pave over the top of that. 3" of binder and 3" of top coat. That raises the road 6" ish...

They only cut back into my driveway about 1 ft from edge of road, instead of making a longer approach to make a long smooth ramp into the driveway from road. I was flat in and out before....

I had warned them about this ahead of time and they did nothing to change their strategy for my driveway. I pleaded with them via the Village, but its a Town Job, even though My neighbor and I are the only ones in Village in this project, Town said it'll be fine and they will asses before going forward, and they did the first layer the next morning.....

Then the second layer was coming down and again I was pleading with them, Talked with the engineers onsite - and got no-where.... Told them I was going to bottom out - then I tested after they blew me off and it was fresh and emailed them the pics into the email conversation - now they said they will fix it, we'll see.

God forbid anyone would do something ahead of time to fix an issue before it happens. Brilliant !!!!




Grinder

Grinder - You can see the painted lines on my driveway, the little amount they cut back

Packer

First Layer

First Layer




You can see the car pulling up and backing off scraped away the fresh blacktop.
I tried it in a few places....



Final Layer

spot where it bottomed out


Material pulled back

 

Ugh... Sorry to hear. You may have to attack it at a more aggressive departure/entry angle than you did previously.

 

I can get in and out on the other side of the driveway, but it scrapes the lower flaps under the car. Its clearly not done properly, and I had to show them in this manor.

Now they literally have to get a whole new crew to come out, cut it back, cut out / remove the new and old, then have a whole paving crew with a new load of black top just to do this freakin driveway.... DUMB

If they choose to do nothing - I'll have it done myself, and send them the bill, even if I have to take them to court. I have email conversations stating it will be made right....

 

Good luck with this. Sad that no one would listen to your concerns up front, but dealing with the government, doesn’t surprise me one bit. Now more taxpayer dollars wasted having to re-do the road again.

 

In the follow up email to the The engineers - the literally told the blacktop company that they would have to pay for it to be fixed. The Town was the one that instructed them to only cut back as much as they did. so the Blacktop company was doing what they were told by the town to save money, and now they put it on the blacktop company..... What do we call that - the big circle jerk !!!!

 

1. The plastic dams underneath rubbing doesn't hurt anything.
2. They don't design for one or two owners with unique needs, but rather for the majority where your driveway would be perfectly fine.

 

I would agree, but for more then the reasons of just my car coming and going, snow plowing and other cars that are as low or lower then my car, it's still a problem that needs to be fixed.

​​​​​​Poor planning and money savings by the govt are always taking priority over making the taxpayer whole.

 

It is hard to convince an ID10T that they are wrong! Best of luck getting it solved.

 

45° angle cross it. No big deal.

 

I agree with the above post, slight angle, problem solved.

Also imagine if every house had personal requests. Projects could spiral. The design needs to be a general use one. Also, I doubt anyone on site had the power to alter a design spec for how it is done. They don't need to risk being perceived as doing something wrong at their job.

 

Not sure how wide the drive way is. From the photos, it doesn't look like he has enough width to do a 45* approach. I know the 45 approach is a good advice and it works for most cases, but that is his drive way where the car always has to go in and out. It is not the same as when you encounter the occasional steep approach, it does become a big deal (kind of a nagging pain) when you are the one who always has to live with it. Best to get it fixed and not warry about it from then.
If they had just increased the ramp by just one foot, he would have been fine.
@Warpdrv I hope you would be able to get them to add a little more to the ramp. Maybe you can get the workers lunch and a cold beverage in return for few buckets of asphalt and a pass or two of the roller. Good luck.

 

Wow, that's amazing. I have seen a lot of road repair around here, but never seen the height raised so much!

Edit: Since the slope is on your side of the road, you could build up some thick rubber mat. Not the most elegant, but not bad either. We have a couple horses at home, and lined the stalls with cow mat (or stall mat). It's really heavy duty. We used cutoffs to help our RV get over a concrete curb

 

Yeah that sux, they tore up my road a few years ago.. car was stuck in garage awhile.. they didn't screw up my driveway, but screwed up a lot of other things.

 

Yeah, its not the end of the world here - I was just posting because I thought it to be an interesting story....
I can still get in and out at a 45 ish on the other side of the driveway.

I have another company coming to extend my driveway in the back of the house to my new big garage, if it isn't fixed by then I'll have them tear it out and redo it....

 

The dug into the front of my lawn so bad they had to come back out and fix it so I could even mow my lawn.. what was left.. these idiots don't care what they do to our roads, driveways, lawns...

 

Frustrating.

I experienced a similar issue a month ago as a small bridge was replaced immediately adjacent to my driveway. I made friends with the crew and they did their best to accommodate me and smoothed out the transition to the street. The supervisor happens to drag race and immediately understood and appreciated my concern.

I was very lucky.

I hope you can come to a good resolution.

 

Update - they came back to fix the approach - the guys were great, and apologized for them to have to come back since the town and engineers were pre-warned about this being an issue, but just turned a blind eye..... Cut it back quite a bit for a super smooth transition.....

 

You should have talked with the foreman on the job.... a case of beer does wonders. I hauled asphalt for 12 years and concrete to asphalt problematic but not too much to over come. Driveways were headaches but the foreman usually got everything smoothed over... so to speak! Courtney