Seasonal and per-visit snow removal for Troy property owners — with what this community actually publishes about plowing, sidewalks and who is responsible for what.
Work in Troy is carried out by an independent snow removal operator under their own company name and insurance. This site arranges the introduction and clears nothing itself.
Troy is the clearest illustration in the county of the four-inch gap. The city says plainly that it lacks “enough hours, staff, money and equipment” to clear the windrows its plows leave across driveway approaches, and that property owners should expect them. Below four inches nothing comes down a subdivision street at all. With 250 miles of local road and 88,733 residents, that is a very large number of households whose winter is entirely their own problem for most of the storms in a season. What to do about the berm.
As a city, Troy holds jurisdiction over its own neighborhood and subdivision streets. RCOC keeps jurisdiction over many of the primary mile-type roads running through it, and MDOT over anything with a letter in its name — which is why a county or state truck can pass the end of your street without turning into it.
Troy does not plow a residential street until snow exceeds four inches. Completion targets after that run 24 hours from storm end for 4 to 8 inches, 36 hours for 8 to 12, and 48 hours above 12. The city maintains 250 miles of local subdivision road and runs six priority classes, with major roads carrying a 12-hour bare-pavement target and sidewalks, parks and cemeteries last. Private roads are not plowed by the city at all.
Southern Oakland County sits at the mild end of the county’s snowfall gradient — closer to Detroit Metro Airport’s 45.0-inch seasonal normal than to the 60 to 70 inches the National Weather Service reports near its White Lake Township office in the county’s northwest. In the February 12–13, 2025 storm, Troy was forecast 4 to 6 inches. Triggers and completion targets across the county.
Private roads are the exception to all of it. No township, city or road commission in Oakland County plows a private road, and four jurisdictions state so in writing. Oakland County has roughly 5,600 miles of public road; everything beyond that is a private arrangement. What to do if yours is one.
Snow over two inches deep plus all ice must be cleared from the adjacent public sidewalk within 24 hours after the snow event ends. There is a real exemption: single and two-family homes on non-major streets are exempt from side and rear-yard sidewalks abutting the listed thoroughfares — Adams, Beach, Big Beaver, Coolidge, Crooks, Dequindre, Fourteen Mile, John R, Livernois, Long Lake, Maple, Northfield Parkway, Rochester, South Boulevard, Square Lake, Stephenson and Wattles. No dollar penalty is published.
A corner lot has two public frontages instead of one, plus the curb ramps in most of these ordinances — three to four times the work of a mid-block house, and blower and shovel work rather than plow work. That is why every rate card checked in this county carries a corner-lot surcharge. Every city’s deadline.
Troy is the county’s post-war and later suburban stock at scale — brick ranches through the older sections, then 1970s to 1990s colonials and quad-levels, on concrete driveways with attached garages. 88,733 residents, 2.63 people per household, 73.3% owner-occupied.
Northfield Hills is the marquee example and unusually well documented: begun in 1957, developed by Chrysler Realty with the planned neighborhood district designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, 1,650 acres planned for 1,600 homes and 2,400 townhouses, bounded by Square Lake and Long Lake Roads and by Crooks Road and Coolidge Highway. Its houses sit on curvilinear roads laid out to preserve open space, woodlots and small lakes — which is lovely, and which means long frontages and awkward approaches in February.
Full basements are standard across this county and frost depth runs about 42 inches. Two practical consequences every winter: stakes go in before the ground freezes, in the first week of November; and snow piled against a foundation or over a basement window well drains into it on the first thaw. Neither is expensive to avoid in October.
Seasonal residential contracts on the one published Oakland County rate card run $1,595 for a single or double driveway with walkways, $2,795 for a circle drive or an unusually long driveway, and $7,995 for a large estate approach, with salting adding roughly $400 at the residential tiers. Per-visit work in recent Michigan data runs $50 to $100 for a typical driveway and sidewalk. Trigger is two inches; staking is included and done in the first week of November.
Ask one question before any of those numbers: does the price include a return pass after the municipal plow leaves a berm across the apron? Farmington Hills and Troy both state on the record that clearing that ridge is the homeowner’s job. All the published figures, with sources.
Nearby: Bloomfield Hills · Bloomfield Township · Novi · Rochester Hills · all service areas
Address, driveway type, what else needs clearing, corner or not, and whether the road is public or private.
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Oakland County