Snow removal in Whitby for wide double driveways.

One town, four different snow jobs

Whitby does not clear the same way end to end, and the street you live on decides which job you are buying.

Rolling Acres and Taunton North were built wide and built recently. Double and triple driveways, and in front of the garage an apron that is often wider again than the driveway itself. It is not the depth that beats you up there, it is the square footage. The same 10 cm that takes twenty minutes off a narrow lot will take most of an hour off one of these.

Williamsburg and Blue Grass Meadows sit in between: enough mature planting to slow the wind, and enough driveway to cost you an evening.

Pringle Creek and Lynde Creek are the older shape of the town: shorter driveways, tighter lots, cars parked on the street, and snowbanks that build along the road edge until February leaves nowhere to put anything.

Port Whitby gets the lake. Snow that fell tidily overnight is rarely still where it fell by the time you open the front door.

Brooklin and West Brooklin sit far enough north to be their own leg of the night rather than the end of the Whitby loop, so I have put them on the Brooklin page instead of quoting them as though they were south Whitby.

What it costs to stop shovelling it

A wide double is where a machine stops being a luxury. By hand it is the better part of an hour in the dark. With a blade it is a few minutes.

Snow removal in Whitby costs $800 plus HST for a season on a small driveway, $975 on a standard one and $1,200 on a large one, for one winter running November 1 to May 1. That buys the season rather than the storm, so a hard February does not cost you more than a quiet one.

We go out at 3 cm on residential property, automatically, and you do not need to phone to start it. I have set out the order the route runs in after a storm, so you can see where a Whitby street falls in it before you buy anything.

If the lawn needs looking after as well, the membership is the cheaper way to the same winter clearing. Gold is $189 a month plus HST and carries the driveway all winter and the mowing all summer. All three are priced and compared on the memberships page if you would rather read them before you call.

Two limits worth reading first. The morning target is 7 AM on Gold and 6:30 AM on Platinum, and a target is not a promise, because trucks break and storms land sideways. Silver at $129 a month plus HST does not plow the driveway at all: it lifts the municipal windrow off the foot of it and banks four full clears a season.

And the honest one. If your driveway is a short single and somebody at home does not mind a shovel, a season of snow clearing is poor value for you. I would rather say so now than bill you in April.

One number behind all of that is the Town's own, and almost nobody reads it. A Whitby residential street is a Class 5 road under the Minimum Maintenance Standards the Town publishes, which means ten centimetres of accumulation before any obligation begins, twenty four hours to meet it once it does, and tertiary streets handled after the primary and secondary network is finished. Your own sidewalk runs on a much shorter clock, twenty four hours from the accumulation under the Clean Community By-law, and that by-law names the windrow as part of what you have to shift. The whole of that, with the Town's own budget figures and what each depth weighs on a driveway, is set out in what snow removal costs in Whitby.

Questions Whitby homeowners ask

Which parts of Whitby are on the route?

All the ones above, and Brooklin and West Brooklin to the north. The more useful answer is that the name of your neighbourhood matters less than how many houses I already clear on your stretch of road. Where there are several, the truck is there once and works down the row. Where there is one on its own, it is a detour, and a detour is what puts you late in the order. Tell me the street and I will tell you which of the two yours is at the moment.

How much snow falls before you come out?

Three centimetres on a residential driveway. That is roughly where a car stops driving over snow and starts pushing it, and well under the depth at which a packed driveway turns to ice until the thaw. You never have to judge whether a snowfall counted.

Is a season price better value than paying per visit here?

On a Whitby double or triple it usually is, because width is what makes a visit expensive. Every clear is billable when you pay by the visit, and a wide driveway takes longer to clear than a narrow one. A season for that driveway is $800, $975 or $1,200 plus HST depending on size, and it does not move when the winter turns hard.

Is salt included, and what else can be charged?

Salt goes down automatically for Platinum members. On Gold a salt only trip is $25 when you ask for one. If the municipal plow comes back and reblocks the foot of the driveway after we have already been, a return trip for that windrow is $45.

Also here: what each membership clears, the year round Whitby page, and commercial snow on a 5 cm trigger.

Summer on the same route: weekly lawn care in Whitby.