In town the driveway is usually short and the rulebook is not. More than a third of the city’s homes are rented, the sidewalk out front is the occupant’s legal job under Sec. 668.11, and from mid-November a car left on the street before dawn can be towed.
Traverse City Snow Plowing is a referral service. Nobody on this site’s payroll drives a plow, shovels a city walk or spreads salt; the independent contractor you are introduced to does that under its own business name and its own insurance.
City work is rarely about distance. It is about space. The city asks residents to avoid pushing or placing snow into the street or alley and to put it on the tree lawn or their own property instead, which on a narrow lot with a garage off the alley leaves an operator very little room by February. The airport station averages about 98 days a year with at least an inch on the ground, so December’s banks are usually still standing in March.
After a winter of roughly 145 inches, as 2025–26 was by April 1, the contract that works on a city lot is one where the contractor has agreed in advance where the snow gets stacked. See how driveway plowing is priced and scoped and what shapes a season price.
With more than a third of homes renter-occupied, one practical detail matters more here than anywhere else in the market: the sidewalk ordinance names the occupant, so a lease should say plainly whether the tenant or the landlord hires the plow and clears the walk.
“The removal of snow and ice from private property and the sidewalk abutting or crossing private property shall be the responsibility of the occupant of such private property.”
City of Traverse City, Code of Ordinances Sec. 668.11Breaking it is a civil infraction. The city’s pages do not print a deadline in hours, a fine amount or a clear-and-bill fee, and this page will not supply one. What the city does publish is that it plows sidewalks itself on seven routes, at a cost of roughly $188,000 a year, and that clearing every walk after a major storm takes five to six days. The city crew passing your frontage does not transfer the duty off you.
In July 2026 several commissioners asked for stronger code enforcement “particularly in downtown areas and for second homes,” with an ordinance review before winter; on September 16 the city settled on seasonal crews rather than new hires for 2026–27. No ordinance change had been reported as of this writing. City assessment records from 2021 counted 55% of residential property in the Leelanau County part of the city as non-homestead. If your house in town sits empty for weeks at a time, write the walk into the contract — the second-home and vacant-property page covers how that is verified from a distance.
| Item | What the city says |
|---|---|
| MDOT trunklines and emergency routes | Plowed first |
| Major streets, then local streets | Next in line |
| Alleys | Last |
| Any street or alley, Nov 16 – Apr 14 | No parking 3–6 a.m.; tow at owner’s cost |
| Downtown streets | No 3–6 a.m. parking in any month |
| Snow from private property | Keep it out of street and alley |
The overnight ban in Sec. 410.04(d)(i) is blanket, with no alternate-side scheme. State law backs the street rule with a fine: MCL 257.677a forbids depositing snow, ice or slush on a roadway — or causing it to be deposited — and that second phrase is broad enough to reach the owner who hired the plow. Whole-house short-term rentals are banned in the city’s residential districts, so a house on a residential street is somebody’s home, a long-term rental, or empty between its owner’s visits. The ordinance pages collect every rule in one place.
Garfield Charter Township wraps the south side of town and is the most renter-heavy place in the whole market, at 56.2% owner-occupied — lower even than the city’s 63.7%. Its ordinance index has no snow, sidewalk-snow or winter parking rule, and its public roads belong to the Grand Traverse County Road Commission, which works state highways first, then primary, secondary, local, subdivision and gravel roads. On those county roads, Grand Traverse County Winter Parking Ordinance No. 12 bans parking from December 1 through March 31, midnight to 8 a.m., with fines stepping from $25 to $100.
The county plow leaves a ridge across driveway ends and says so; the road commission’s advice is to pile your own snow on the right-hand side, facing the road. How the berm is handled in a contract.
Where the snow falls heaviest around town is mapped on the station-by-station snowfall page; every other community is on the service-area list.
Give the street, say whether the garage opens onto an alley, and say whether the walk is part of the job.
Call (231) 715-4148 Get a Season Price
Traverse City