Iceworks prices by driveway size, and driveway size is measured one specific way: the number of cars that could park side by side across the widest part of your driveway. Not the number of cars you own. Not the number of garage doors. The widest part of the pavement, measured in car-widths, as if you were actually parking cars across it.

Most people can size their driveway correctly in about two minutes once they know the rule. Here is how to do it right the first time.

Start at the widest point

Walk your driveway and find where it is widest. For a plain straight driveway, the width is the same everywhere and this takes five seconds. But many driveways in Blaine and Circle Pines are not plain rectangles — they flare near the garage, or a parking pad sits alongside, or a turnaround branches off. The measurement happens at the widest spot, wherever that is.

Then apply the test literally: how many cars could park side by side there, doors able to open? If you would rather use a tape measure, a parked car with room to open its doors takes up roughly nine to ten feet. A driveway that measures twenty feet across at its widest point is a 2-car driveway. Thirty-two feet is a 3-car pushing 4. If you land between sizes, the honest answer is the larger one — the pavement does not shrink because the number was borderline.

What counts toward the width

Everything that gets cleared counts. In practice, three features cause most of the confusion:

  • Aprons. The flare where your driveway meets the street. If the apron fans out wider than the rest of the driveway, that flare is part of the widest point.
  • Turnarounds. A back-out pad or Y-turnaround sits beside the main ribbon. Where it does, the width is measured across both together — ribbon plus turnaround, side by side.
  • Parking pads. Same rule. A 2-car driveway with a boat pad next to it is not a 2-car driveway at that spot.

The logic is not bureaucratic. The machine has to clear all of that pavement every storm, and the width at the widest point is what determines how many passes that takes.

The 75-foot length cap

Every standard size — 1-car through 4-car — assumes a driveway up to 75 feet long, measured from the street to the far end of the pavement. Most suburban driveways in the north metro are comfortably under that. But if yours runs longer — common in Lino Lakes and the more rural corners of Anoka County — it is outside the standard sizes at any width, and it needs an oversized driveway quote instead.

No long tape? Pace it off. An adult stride is close to three feet, so twenty-five paces is right around the cap. If you count thirty paces from the curb to the back of the pad, do not pick a standard size and hope.

What happens if you pick the wrong size

Every signup gets checked against satellite imagery of the actual driveway. If the size selected does not match the pavement that is there, it gets corrected, and the customer pays the difference — nothing more, no penalty, just the price the driveway would have carried in the first place.

Which means deliberately picking a size down does not actually save anything. It buys a few weeks of a lower number, followed by a correction and an invoice for the gap. The system is built to be forgiving about honest mistakes, and it is genuinely hard to abuse — pavement is visible from space.

The better outcome for everyone is simpler: measure once, pick the size the driveway actually is, and never think about it again.

What does not matter

A few things people expect to affect the size, and do not:

  • How many cars you own. Zero cars or five, the pavement is the pavement.
  • Garage stalls. A 2-car garage frequently sits behind a 3-car driveway. The garage is not what gets cleared.
  • Surface material. Asphalt, concrete, pavers — the size is the size.
  • A normal slope. Most Minnesota driveways have some pitch; it changes nothing about sizing. A genuinely steep driveway is a layout question, not a size question, and worth a conversation on its own.

Once you have your size, the estimate takes about a minute. Measure the widest point, count the cars, check the length — and you will get the right number the first time.