Potholes, plow gouges, broken edges, heaved and sunken spots, and crack filling, around Akron and Canton. Most driveways that look beaten up in April do not need replacing. They need the handful of places the winter got into fixed properly, before next winter uses them to get into the rest.
The best time to look is a dry day in April, once the salt has washed off. What you find usually falls into one of these:
Cold patch is the black material sold in bags at hardware stores, and it has its place. In February, with a hole in the drive and hot asphalt hard to come by, it is exactly what you want. It is a stopgap, though. It never bonds to the old edges, it pumps out under tires, and nothing has been done about the water that made the hole in the first place.
A repair meant to last is built differently. The failed area is cut back to solid asphalt with straight edges. The broken material comes out. If the stone underneath is wet or soft, that comes out too and is replaced and compacted. Hot asphalt goes back in layers, each one rolled, and the joint around the edge is sealed so meltwater cannot find the seam. It is slower, and it is the one still there in five winters.
Akron-Canton averages 47 inches of snow a year, and most of it falls from December through March. Every thaw sends meltwater, carrying salt, down any open crack into the stone. Every cold night freezes it again. Ice takes up more room than water, so each freeze pries the crack a little wider and lifts its edges, and the next thaw lets more water in. A crack you could slide a coin into in October can be a loose edge by March and a pothole by May.
That is why filling cracks and fixing small failures is the cheapest money you can spend on a driveway here. Every opening closed before the first hard freeze is one less path for water into the base.
Beside the snow pile. Wherever the shovel or the plow stacks the snow, the edge next to it stays wet for weeks every spring. That edge crumbles first.
Under the downspout. A gutter that empties onto the drive puts a roof's worth of meltwater on one spot every thaw. Moving the outlet a few feet is often worth more than the patch.
At the low end of a sloped drive. Water runs down and stops there, so the bottom of a hillside drive is routinely soft while the top is fine. Patching it without dealing with the water just resets the clock.
On a lot, repairs gather where the plow and the trucks work hardest: the entrance lip, the ring of asphalt around each drain grate, the dumpster pad and the lanes where delivery trucks turn. Those are cut out and rebuilt first, then the whole lot is filled, sealed and restriped, so the repairs and the rest of the surface wear in together. For a board or a manager, the repairs go on the same written sheet as the sealing. More on parking lot sealcoating and on the property managers page.
When the drive is being sealed, crack filling and small patches sit inside the same price per square foot as the coat, so they never arrive as a separate bill. A repair on its own, or a larger area that has to be excavated and rebuilt, is priced per job after somebody has looked at it, because the size of the area, the depth of the failure and the state of the base decide the work. You get one written number before anything starts.
Crack filling can run later than sealer, but a hot asphalt patch still needs dry ground and temperatures above freezing to bond and compact. Once the nights are regularly below freezing, the honest answer is a cold patch for the winter and a proper repair in spring.
At first, yes. New asphalt is darker and tighter than a drive that has been through several winters. Sealing the whole drive afterwards makes it read as one surface, which is why repairs and sealing usually go together.
Yes. The apron takes the plow, the turning load and the slush thrown off the road, so it often fails first. If it sits in the city right-of-way, the permit is part of the quote.
It is built the way a new drive is built, so it should last as long as the asphalt around it, as long as its seams are kept sealed and the water that caused it is dealt with.
Send the address through the form, pick repair, and add a photo of the damage if you have one. You will be told what it is, whether a patch and a coat will do or whether it is past that, and what it costs. Repairs are carried out by local independent contractors.
