Watch a full winter of service closely and you will notice something inconsistent-looking: on some storms the tractor comes once, and on the big ones it comes twice. That is not a crew being disorganized — it is the storm's size dictating the right number of visits. Here is the logic, including when a second pass is essential and when it would be a waste of everyone's time.

The open-up pass

On storms over 2 inches, the first visit often happens while snow is still falling. Call it the open-up pass: it is not trying to produce a finished driveway, because the storm will bury the work within hours. It exists for two mechanical reasons.

First, depth. A snowblower moves 4 inches twice far more happily than 8 inches once — deep, settled snow loads the machine, slows ground speed, and stretches the whole route at exactly the moment every driveway needs it. Second, you. People still have shifts to work and kids to fetch mid-storm, and an opened driveway keeps the household mobile. Just as important, driving on 6 unplowed inches packs it into a base layer that no blower fully lifts — the stuff that turns into rutted ice for the rest of the month. Opening the driveway mid-storm means what you drive on is an inch of fresh fluff, not the whole event.

The finish pass

The second visit is the one that produces the driveway you actually keep: after the snow ends, and — this is the part people miss — after the city plow has come down your street. Municipal plows run their own routes on their own timeline, frequently hours behind the storm, and they leave a dense plow ridge across the end of every driveway they pass. A finish pass that arrives before the city plow gets undone at your apron an hour later. So the finish pass is sequenced to land last: full-width clearing, edges done, ridge gone.

That sequencing is also why your neighbor across the street may see the tractor at a different hour than you do on the same storm — different sides of a street can sit on different route segments, and the city plow does not hit every street in a neighborhood at the same time.

When a second visit shouldn't happen

A storm between 1 and 2 inches gets exactly one visit, after the snow stops, and that is the correct number. Clearing a small storm twice would double the machine-hours spent per driveway — which stretches the route for every customer — and double the scraping wear on your slab, in exchange for removing an inch that was never going to strand anyone. The same goes for the long, lazy events that drop 2 inches over eighteen hours: there is nothing gained by clearing at hour six. A crew that shows up twice for every dusting is not being thorough; it is being inefficient with everyone's winter.

This is also worth saying plainly: on a seasonal agreement, one visit or two, the storm is covered either way. The pass count is an operational decision about snow, never a billing event. There is no per-storm charge and no surcharge for the storms that take two trips.

Why was my driveway snowy again an hour after the first pass?

Because that was the open-up pass, mid-storm, and more snow fell on it — exactly as expected. The finish pass is coming once the storm and the city plow are done. If it helps, the portal shows route status in real time, which beats squinting out the window at 5 a.m. The one thing not to conclude from a snowy driveway mid-storm is that the visit "didn't count." The visit that counts is the last one.

The bottom line

Big storms get two passes because depth, mid-storm mobility, and the city plow's schedule demand it; small storms get one pass because anything more is wasted motion. The number of visits is set by the storm, the finish is what you are owed, and the finish always includes the ridge on storms over 2 inches. Get a seasonal estimate, or see how the service works.