Abilene, Texas · Taylor County
The approach is the strip of concrete between the street and your property line, where your driveway crosses the parkway and meets the curb. It sits in the City's right-of-way, so in Abilene it's built to City standards, under a City permit, and inspected before a single truck pours. Abilene Concrete Builders builds new approaches, widens old ones, and replaces the cracked, sunken approaches that scrape the bottom of every car that turns in.
Anyone building or repairing an approach, sidewalk or curb in the right-of-way, whether a contractor or the homeowner, has to give the City a $1,000 Street Contractor's Bond to get a permit. The City says the bond can be bought from most insurance companies and must expire December 31 of the current year, and it isn't the same as a general Contractor's Bond. We carry it, so you don't have to buy one for a single job.
All right-of-way work, new or repair, is permitted through the Engineering Division of Public Works. Some locations, especially in commercial areas, have special rules about whether an approach is allowed at all, so the City asks that you check with Public Works Design Services before requesting the permit.
Inspection Services checks the forms before concrete goes in. Passing forms get a blue inspection form, and forms that miss the standard get a yellow correction notice. The first follow-up inspection carries no charge, and the City lists a $25 re-inspection fee after that for the same problem.
The City's Design Standards include a residential concrete approach detail, sheet DS-4. Here's what it spells out, in plain terms:
It reads like a lot of rules for a small slab. Think of the approach as a short piece of street that happens to sit in front of your house: the City wants it to carry a garbage truck backing in and drain the gutter the same way the rest of the block does.
The City's answer here is direct: knocking off the back of the curb and gutter to make it easier to drive onto a lot isn't allowed, and approaches have to be built at every access point. Bagged sackcrete doesn't meet City standards either, so we pour approaches with ready-mixed concrete delivered by truck.
For a new access point, DS-4's curb cut detail calls for a saw cut at least 2 inches deep and #4 deformed dowels 18 inches long, spaced 18 inches apart, tying the new approach to the curb. We saw-cut, remove the old curb section and pour the new approach in one placement.
A wider mouth at the street usually goes with a wider driveway behind it. We handle both sides of the property line in one job. The private side is covered on our concrete driveway page.
Send the address and a photo from the street, and tell us what you want to drive in. Call (325) 728-4111 anytime, or use the quote form and choose "Driveway Approach / Curb Cut."
Prefer to talk? Call (325) 728-4111 anytime.
See every service we offer at Abilene Concrete Builders.
