Widening is the most commonly misunderstood driveway job in Ottawa, for a simple reason: the part of your driveway you think of as yours stops at the property line. Past that, to the curb or the ditch, you are working in the City right of way, and the City has its own by-law, its own design standards and its own permit for that strip.
On 8 April 2026 the City enacted the Access By-law (No. 2026-139), which replaced the old Private Approach By-law (No. 2003-447). If you are reading advice written before that date — including plenty that still ranks — it is referring to a by-law that no longer exists. We explain what changed here.
Step one: how much width is available to you
| Where your property is | Maximum driveway width |
|---|---|
| Downtown core and urban areas | Generally 6 m |
| Urban lots with less than 6 m of frontage | No individual driveway permitted — the driveway must be shared with an abutting lot |
| All other areas, including the rural and village areas | 50% of the lot width |
| Every property, as a separate cap | All accesses together — driveway and walkway — cannot exceed 50% of the frontage they sit on |
Two traps in that table. The first is the shared-driveway rule: on an urban lot under 6 metres wide you are not permitted an individual driveway at all. The second is the combined cap — your driveway and your walkway are measured together against 50% of your frontage, so a wide front walk is width you cannot also use for parking.
The access in the right of way is also not permitted to be wider than the approved driveway width on your private property. You cannot flare it out at the curb to gain a turning radius.
Step two: the permits
An access permit is required to construct, modify, close or remove a vehicular access — and the City is explicit that modifying includes widening. It is also required to construct or reconstruct an access culvert, which is what most rural and village widenings turn on.
The access permit approves the design and location. It does not authorise the digging. Once it is approved you need a road cut permit under the Road Activity By-law (No. 2003-445) before work starts in the right of way.
The application fee is due when you apply and is non-refundable, so it is worth checking your design against the Access Design Requirements first. Those cover total width, the minimum distance from a neighbouring property line, distance from an intersection, slope and construction standards.
Front yard parking permits are on hold. The Zoning By-law (No. 2026-50) permissions for creating new front yard parking spaces are not in effect until the Ontario Land Tribunal declares those regulations in effect. The City anticipated that happening by the end of September 2026. Until it does, the City cannot process a permit application to install or widen an access serving a new front yard parking space.
If that is your project, the sensible move is to get the design and quote settled now and file the moment the hold lifts — which also puts you in the queue for spring rather than at the back of it.
Step three: the surface
Section 601(5) of the Zoning By-law lists what an access may be surfaced with:
- Asphalt, cement or permeable pavement
- Honeycomb or turf blocks
- Cobblestones, or a similar stable, dust-free material — this is where interlocking pavers sit
- Gravel, but only in rural areas
A pedestrian access has to be a firm, stable, continuous surface. Stepping stones and other loose rock are not a permitted access in the right of way, however good they look in a catalogue.
If you are widening in interlock to match an existing driveway, the matching itself is the hard part — pavers change colour as they weather and discontinued lines are common. How we handle matching →
If the widening is going to shed more water toward your foundation or your neighbour, consider doing it in permeable pavement instead. It is a permitted surface, it solves the drainage question, and in a Priority Stormwater Retrofit Area the City rebates it up to $5,000. Permeable paving →
What widening costs
Installed interlock in Ottawa generally runs $18–30 per square foot. A typical single-side widening of 200–350 square feet therefore lands somewhere around $4,000–9,000, before any culvert or curb work. A widening does not cost proportionally less than a full driveway: mobilisation, excavation, granular base and disposal barely scale down, and matching into existing work adds labour. Detailed cost breakdown →
What we would need from you
- Your address, so we can look at the frontage and the right of way
- Frontage width, and the current driveway width
- Whether there is a ditch, a culvert or a curb at the road edge
- Whether the driveway is shared with a neighbour
- A couple of photos from the street, if you have them
From that we can usually tell you whether the widening you want is permitted before we come out to measure.
A caution about doing it without the permit
People do pave first and ask later, and it sometimes goes unnoticed for years. But an access built without a permit is not simply grandfathered by the passage of time, and enforcement in Ottawa has been criticised publicly as inconsistent rather than absent — which is a different and less comforting problem. What happened in Barrhaven →
Find out what your frontage allows
Send us the address and the frontage width. We'll tell you the permitted width, the permits you need and a price range, before any site visit.