Snow removal · Winter
Windrow Clearing in Durham Region: Who Actually Does It, Town by Town
Windrow clearing in Durham Region is the homeowner's job in all five municipalities we serve, and every published exception is an assistance program with an age or disability test, a deadline, and a snow depth most storms never reach.
Gold and Platinum take the whole driveway. See what each membership covers.
Green in summer. Clear in winter.
The short answer
In all five Durham municipalities we serve, the windrow is legally and explicitly the property owner's responsibility. Not one of them clears driveway windrows for the general public. Four run an assistance program for seniors and people with disabilities, each with its own application deadline, its own price and its own minimum snow depth. Three of those deadlines fall inside the next seven weeks.
Where every Durham town stands, in one table
These are each municipality's published positions, taken from their own winter maintenance pages in September 2026. Programs change and prices move, so treat the table as a starting point and confirm with the town before you rely on a date.
| Municipality | Clears windrows for everyone? | Assistance program | Minimum windrow depth | Season cost | Key date for 2026 to 27 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oshawa | No | Snow Clearing Assistance Program, 65 or over or a documented disability | 20 cm | No fee published | Applications reopen 1 October 2026 |
| Whitby | No | Snow and Windrow Clearing Services, 65 or over or documented inability | 10 cm | No fee charged | Opens 14 September, closes 1 November 2026 |
| Ajax | No, and Council has rejected it | A separate seniors snow removal program, not windrow specific | Not published | Not published | Call the Town, 905-683-2951 |
| Pickering | No | Seniors and Persons with Disabilities Snow Clearing | Not published | $0 to $240.69, set by household income | Documents due 16 October 2026 |
| Clarington Bowmanville, Courtice, Newcastle | No | Snow Clearing Program for Seniors and Persons with Disabilities | 15 cm | $107.69 including HST | Applications 21 September to 31 October 2026 |
Sources, in order: the City of Oshawa snow clearing help page, the Town of Whitby snow and windrow clearing page, the Town of Ajax winter roads page, the City of Pickering accessibility snow clearing page and the Municipality of Clarington snow clearing program page.
What a windrow is, and why every plow leaves one
Oshawa defines it plainly on its own website: the windrow is the pile of snow at the bottom of the driveway after a snowplow clears the street. That sentence is doing more work than it looks. It is not describing a mistake, a lazy operator or a plow driver in a hurry. It is describing the only physical outcome a plow blade can produce.
A municipal plow does not pick snow up. It carries snow sideways. The blade sits at an angle and the snow rides along the face of it, building into a rolling mass that travels with the truck until something lets it go. Along a stretch of curb with no openings, that mass just keeps rolling and piles against the snowbank. The moment the truck passes a driveway, the curb line disappears and the accumulated snow spills into the gap. Then the blade picks up more, and the next driveway gets the same treatment.
Ajax puts the consequence in about as blunt a form as a municipality ever does: windrows will always occur when snow is plowed, and they cannot be avoided by raising or lowering the front plow. There is no setting. A plow operator who tried to spare your driveway would simply deposit the same volume forty feet further along, into your neighbour's.
This is why the windrow is dense in a way ordinary snowfall is not. The snow in it has already been compressed under the blade, dragged across pavement, mixed with road salt and grit, and then left in a pile where it sets. Twenty centimetres of fresh snow on your lawn and twenty centimetres of windrow across your apron are not the same material and they do not take the same amount of work. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety makes the general point and it is worth reading before the first storm: fresh dry snow is lighter and more manageable than wet, heavily packed or partly melted snow, and a person lifting roughly five kilograms every five seconds is moving over seventy kilograms a minute.
That is the real shape of the problem. The windrow is the smallest part of the driveway by area and the largest part of it by effort.
Why no Durham town simply clears them
Every winter this question arrives at every council in the region, and the answer is always the same, for the same reason. The number is enormous.
Pickering's own winter reminders page reports that council examined two ways of doing it and priced both: contracting the work out at roughly $7.4 million a year, or running it in house at roughly $19.8 million in the first year. Council's conclusion was that windrow clearing stays with the resident, and the accessibility program is capped at around 750 applicants. Ajax studied the same question in 2019 and landed on an estimate above $1.8 million a year, with the additional finding that even where equipment was deployed it could clear about eighty per cent of a driveway's width, which means the resident still comes out with a shovel.
Set that against what a town is already doing. Oshawa alone maintains roughly 1,265 lane kilometres of winter road network: over 500 kilometres of primary roads, 765 kilometres of residential roads and about 160 kilometres of sidewalk. Adding every driveway apron in the city to that list is not a scheduling problem. It is a second fleet.
So the position is settled and it is not going to move: the street is a public asset and the town clears it, the driveway is a private asset and you clear it, and the windrow is what happens where the two meet.
The assistance programs, and the deadline you are probably about to miss
If you or a parent qualifies, these are worth the paperwork. The catch is that almost every one of them closes its application window before the first serious storm, which means people discover the program in January and cannot join until the following season.
Oshawa
The Snow Clearing Assistance Program covers city sidewalks and driveway windrows for residents aged 65 or over, or with a documented disability, where no non-disabled household member under 65 lives at the property. It has to be a single family dwelling. Proof of disability is accepted in several forms, including an accessible parking permit, a CNIB client card, a CPP disability benefit card or a doctor's note. The service clears the windrow only, not the rest of the driveway, and it only attends when the windrow is at least 20 cm high. Applications and renewals reopen on 1 October 2026.
Whitby
Whitby's program is the most generous in the region on price, because there is no fee at all. Eligibility is 65 or over, or a documented physical inability to clear snow, with nobody under 65 in the household able to help. Clearing begins about 36 hours after the snow stops, at a 5 cm minimum for sidewalks and a 10 cm minimum for windrows. Registration opens 14 September 2026 and the cutoff is firm at 1 November 2026.
Pickering
Pickering's program is income tested, which is unusual and worth knowing about. Households receiving the Guaranteed Income Supplement or GAINS pay nothing. Below $90,997 it is $128.82 including HST, then $186.45, then $240.69 at the top band, and above $199,900 you are not eligible. Applicants must be the registered property owner with taxes current, live in urban Pickering or one of the named hamlets, and not be away more than two consecutive weeks in the season. Post dated cheques and supporting documents are due 16 October 2026.
Clarington
Clarington covers sidewalks plus the windrow to a depth of about three feet of the driveway apron next to the road. Sidewalks are cleared within 24 hours of snowfall ending once accumulation passes 7.5 cm. The windrow is cleared after the municipal roads are done, and only when snow exceeds 15 cm. The season costs $107.69 including HST and the application window is 21 September to 31 October 2026.
Ajax
Ajax does not run a windrow clearing program and has decided not to. It does operate a separate snow removal program aimed at seniors and residents with a documented disability, which is not the same thing and is not windrow specific. Its terms were last revised some time ago and the Town is the only reliable source for the current fee and eligibility, so call 905-683-2951 rather than relying on anything published second hand, including this page.
The depth trigger is the part nobody reads
Here is the detail that decides whether one of these programs will actually change your winter, and it is buried in every one of them.
Oshawa attends a windrow at 20 cm. Clarington attends at 15 cm. Whitby attends at 10 cm. Those are not storm totals. They are the height of the windrow itself, measured at your apron, and a plow passing a driveway at speed will heap the street's snow into a ridge noticeably taller than whatever fell. Even so, a large share of Durham storms will not produce a 20 cm windrow.
By our own count of Environment Canada's daily records for Oshawa across eighteen complete winters, the city averages about twelve days a year with 3 cm or more of snow and about twenty-seven with any measurable snow at all, which we set out in detail in our guide to when snow actually starts in Oshawa. Most of those days are small. They are also the days that quietly ruin a Tuesday, because a 12 cm windrow of salted, compacted plow snow across a double driveway is a genuine job and it sits below Oshawa's threshold entirely.
So read the program you are joining as what it is: protection against the worst four or five mornings of the winter, not against the winter. That is a real and valuable thing. It is not the same as having the driveway handled.
What the law says about where that snow can go
Once the windrow is yours, so is the question of where you put it, and this is where a surprising number of otherwise careful homeowners break the law without knowing it.
The province is unambiguous. Section 181 of the Highway Traffic Act reads: No person shall deposit snow or ice on a roadway without permission in writing so to do from the Ministry or the road authority responsible for the maintenance of the road. That is the whole section. It applies to every road in Ontario, and it does not carve out an exception for the snow that a plow put on your property first.
Municipalities layer their own rules on top. Whitby's Clean Community By-law 8271-26 states at section 8.6 that no person shall shovel, plow or blow any snow, slush or ice onto or across a highway, a sidewalk or a pedestrian walkway without authorization, and at section 6.1 that owners must clear snow and ice, including a windrow, from any sidewalk within 24 hours of it accumulating. Pickering's Ice and Snow Clearing By-law 6650/06 carries the same prohibition on depositing snow onto a city street, along with the same 24 hour sidewalk rule. Clarington's By-law 93-144 sets the 24 hour sidewalk requirement as well.
Two practical consequences follow, and they are the ones we watch people get wrong every winter:
- The windrow goes onto your property, not back onto the street. Onto the boulevard, onto the lawn, into the snow storage at the edge of the driveway. Not across the road, and not into the intersection.
- Snow thrown back into the roadway refreezes into a hazard with your address attached to it. That is the reason the rule exists. It is not about tidiness.
There is a third one that costs people money later. Piling the windrow against a garage door, a downspout or a gas meter is legal and still a bad idea, because that pile is the last thing on the property to melt and it holds water against whatever it is leaning on for weeks.
Why the road is cleared in hours and your driveway is not
People often read the speed of the municipal response as proof that clearing the windrow would be easy. It is worth understanding why the street moves so fast, because the answer explains precisely why the apron does not.
Ontario sets the municipal standard in O. Reg. 239/02, the Minimum Maintenance Standards for Municipal Highways. Section 4 requires a municipality to deploy resources as soon as practicable once snow depth passes the figure in the table, and then to reduce it below that depth within a set time. Roads are classed by posted speed and traffic volume.
| Class of highway | Snow depth that triggers the standard | Time allowed to clear it |
|---|---|---|
| Class 1 | 2.5 cm | 4 hours |
| Class 2 | 5 cm | 6 hours |
| Class 3 | 8 cm | 12 hours |
| Class 4 | 8 cm | 16 hours |
| Class 5 | 10 cm | 24 hours |
Read that as an operations schedule rather than a legal text and the winter makes sense. A municipality has a clock running on its arterials from the moment 2.5 cm lands, so the arterials go first, every time, in every town. Residential streets sit further down the classes with far longer windows, which is why your street can still be unplowed at 9 AM while Taunton Road has been bare pavement since 5.
And here is the whole point: the regulation says nothing at all about the driveway apron. The standard governs the travelled portion of the roadway. The apron is private property, it falls outside the regulation, and nothing in Ontario law obliges anyone to clear it. The windrow lives in exactly that gap, and it always has.
Who owns the road outside your house, and why it changes your windrow
Durham has two road authorities and most homeowners have never had a reason to notice which one is outside their door. After a storm, it matters.
The Regional Municipality of Durham maintains the Regional road system all year round. Those are the arterials: Simcoe Street, Thornton Road and Bloor Street in Oshawa, Taunton Road, Thickson Road and Brock Street in Whitby, Bayly Street and Salem Road in Ajax, Brock Road, Altona Road and Finch Avenue in Pickering, Courtice Road, Main Street and Bowmanville Avenue in Clarington. Everything else residential is the local municipality's, and the Province holds the 400 series.
If your driveway opens onto a Regional road, three things change. The road is in a higher maintenance class, so it is cleared sooner and more often. The equipment running it is bigger and moving faster. And both of those produce a heavier, denser windrow, delivered earlier in the storm and then topped up on every subsequent pass.
Houses fronting an arterial get the worst windrows in Durham, and they get them first. If that is you, the assistance program depth triggers are far more likely to be met, and a per visit contractor is far more likely to leave you waiting, because everyone on that stretch is calling at the same time.
Timing, and the mistake that doubles the work
The most expensive error in a Durham winter is not skipping a clear. It is clearing at the wrong hour.
The sequence in a typical overnight storm runs like this. Snow falls through the night. Arterials are plowed on the provincial clock while it is still falling. Residential streets are plowed once the snowfall ends or once the crews work down the priority list, which is commonly early morning. Your driveway gets its windrow at that moment, whatever you did to it beforehand.
Which produces the classic Durham scene: someone finishes a driveway at 6 AM, showers, comes back out at 7:15 with the car keys and finds a metre wide ridge of plow snow across the end of it, harder than anything they moved an hour earlier. The work was not wasted, exactly, but the timing turned one job into two.
- If you can wait, wait for the street plow. Clear once, after it passes, and you handle the whole driveway including the windrow in a single go.
- If you cannot wait, clear a car width and leave the rest. Get out, go to work, and deal with the full driveway that evening when the plow has been and gone.
- Do not pile snow on the downwind side of the driveway mouth. It funnels the next windrow deeper into the entrance.
- Cut the corners back on the first clear of the season. A mouth that starts wide stays usable in March. A mouth that starts tight loses a foot on every storm until a car cannot turn into it.
That last one is the single best piece of advice in this article and almost nobody does it. By the middle of February the width of your driveway entrance is entirely decided by how generous you were with it in December.
What we do about the windrow
We built our winter service around this problem specifically, because in eight winters of doing it the windrow is what people actually complain about. Not the driveway. The end of it.
On Gold and Platinum the whole driveway is ours, windrow included, with unlimited visits, no per storm charge and no phone call needed from you. Our target after overnight snow is 7 AM, which is chosen to sit after the residential plow on most storms rather than before it, because clearing your driveway ahead of the plow is exactly the mistake described above.
On Silver we are not plowing your driveway and we say so plainly. What Silver gets is the windrow pass: after every storm we run, we take the city windrow off the end of the driveway, plus four banked full clears a season on request. It exists because a homeowner who is happy to shovel fresh snow is very often not happy to break up a salted ridge left by a truck, and those are two genuinely different jobs.
If you want the reasoning behind those prices rather than the prices alone, we set out the per visit, seasonal and bundled numbers side by side in what snow removal costs in Durham Region. If you want the service pages for your own town, they are here: Oshawa, Whitby and Brooklin, Ajax, Pickering, Bowmanville and Courtice. The full winter scope is on the snow removal page and the three membership levels are on memberships and pricing.
One honest note to close on. If you or a parent qualifies for a municipal assistance program, join it. It costs nothing in Whitby and $107.69 in Clarington, and no private contractor in this region will beat that. Read the depth trigger before you assume it covers your winter, and then decide whether the days below the threshold are worth handling yourself.
Questions people actually ask
Can I make the plow driver skip my driveway?
No, and it is not a question of willingness. Ajax states on its own winter roads page that windrows cannot be avoided by raising or lowering the front plow. The snow riding the blade has to be set down somewhere, and a driveway is simply the first gap in the curb line where it can go.
Can I push the windrow back into the road?
No. Section 181 of the Highway Traffic Act prohibits depositing snow or ice on a roadway without written permission from the road authority, and Whitby and Pickering both carry their own by-laws saying the same thing. It also refreezes into a hazard that is traceable to your address.
I am 70 and I live alone. Do I qualify for help?
Very likely, in Oshawa, Whitby, Pickering or Clarington, provided no household member under 65 lives with you and the property is a single family dwelling. Each town has its own proof requirements and its own deadline, and three of the four close before 1 November 2026. Start with your own municipality's page rather than a general search.
Why does my windrow look worse than my neighbour's?
Usually the road class. A driveway on a Regional arterial is plowed sooner, more often and by heavier equipment than one on a residential crescent, so it collects more snow and denser snow. Corner lots and driveways just past a bend also catch more, because that is where the blade sheds its load.
Does salt help with a windrow?
Not much, and not the way people hope. The windrow is already salted from the roadway and it is compacted rather than icy, so salt is working against volume rather than a bond. Salt earns its keep on the thin refrozen layer left behind after the windrow is moved, which is where the actual slip risk sits.
Should I clear the windrow before or after the street is plowed?
After, whenever the morning allows it. Clearing before the plow arrives means doing the entrance twice, and the second time is the hard version. If you have to get out early, open a car width and leave the rest for the evening.
Before the first storm
Three more things worth reading now
When does snow actually start in Oshawa?
The first storm worth clearing lands weeks before most people have booked anything. Here is the month by month shape of a Durham winter.
Read the timeline →What snow removal costs in Durham Region
Per visit, seasonal and bundled, with our own numbers in the tables and the breakeven calculation written out.
Read the numbers →What our winter service actually covers
The 3 cm trigger, the 7 AM target, what Silver gets and does not get, and where the snow goes on your property.
See the service →Stop meeting the windrow at 7 AM.
On Gold and Platinum the whole driveway is ours, windrow included, with no per storm charge and no call from you. Tell us your address and we will send a fixed monthly number the same day, Monday to Saturday.
Green in summer. Clear in winter.