If your road is private, no public agency is coming — not the township, not the city, not the Road Commission. The snow on it is arranged by the road rather than by the house, and it is priced completely differently.
Work 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.
Orion Township: “Property owners who border private roads are responsible for their maintenance and snow plowing. The Township does not handle private road upkeep.” The same page makes the broader point that catches most people out: “Townships in Michigan have no jurisdiction over roads.”
Independence Township, covering Clarkston: private roads “are the responsibility of the homeowners whose homes live along the private roads.” It also publishes an interactive Road Jurisdiction Map showing which roads in the township are public and which are private — the single most useful artifact of its kind in the county, and the fastest way to settle the question for a specific address.
Waterford Township: “Property owners bear full responsibility for maintaining private roads within the Township.”
City of Troy: its published snow and ice control procedures state that private roads are not plowed by the city, and the city separately prohibits its own crews from removing snow from private property.
The Road Commission for Oakland County publishes the full picture, and it is worth reading as a boundary rather than as a service promise. Oakland County contains approximately 5,600 miles of public road:
RCOC holds jurisdiction over every road in every township, subdivision streets included, and funds that work from state fuel taxes and registration fees rather than property tax — averaging, by Orion Township’s account, $2,000 to $3,000 per mile of subdivision street per year. Its own priority statement is unambiguous: traffic volume and speed decide the order, roads over 40,000 vehicles a day come first, and “what roads are at the bottom of the priority list? Unfortunately, it is our subdivision streets.”
Everything outside that 5,600 miles is private. Nobody publishes how many miles that is — no township, no road commission, no county department — so this site does not claim a figure. What is certain is the rule, not the total.
A modification to Michigan’s Act 51 in the late 1960s allowed Bloomfield Township to assume surface maintenance of its own subdivision roads, funded by a dedicated one-mill millage. The township plows more than 200 miles of subdivision road across twelve service areas, while RCOC retains legal jurisdiction and handles thoroughfares, signage and drainage.
It is the only arrangement of its kind in the county, and it is why a Bloomfield Township resident’s experience of winter does not generalize to Orion or West Bloomfield. It still does not extend to private roads.
The common arrangement where a subdivision, site condominium or gated community has a board and a budget. One contract, one trigger depth, one invoice, and the cost is already in the assessment. Gated communities in Novi and the maintained-common-area associations in Bloomfield Hills work this way.
A shared drive or a short private road with no association. One household organizes, everyone pays a share. Cheapest and most fragile — it falls apart the first winter somebody declines, and there is no mechanism to make them pay.
Act 139 of 1972, Michigan’s Maintenance of Private Roads act, lets a township board provide for private-road maintenance by contract and recover the cost through a special assessment on the benefiting owners, with petitions, a public hearing and an annual program. It is the formal route when the informal one has failed. The act’s own definition of “maintenance” could not be verified, so this site does not claim the statute names snow removal specifically — only that the township-contract mechanism exists.
On price: the one Oakland County operator that publishes anything about this work states that commercial contracts start around $15,000 a season, billed monthly October through March, and that private roads are among the properties it handles. No local contractor publishes a private-road rate card, which is why more than one proposal matters here more than anywhere else. For boards and associations.
Length, number of properties, trigger depth and where the snow can go. That is enough for comparable proposals from more than one operator.
Call (248) 494-7362 Get a Seasonal Quote
Oakland County