Virginia Beach is two places in one city: the suburbs that grew up after 1963 in the north, and farmland, marsh and Back Bay in the south. The driveways are as different as that sounds, and so are the rules at the oceanfront. This page covers both halves.
Kempsville, Great Neck, Bayside, Pembroke Manor, Chesapeake Beach, Lynnhaven, Green Run, Princess Anne, Oceana, the oceanfront, and south through Pungo to Sandbridge. Homes, HOA streets, shopping centre lots and churches anywhere in the city.
The resort town became an independent city in 1952, and in 1963 it merged with Princess Anne County. The county had already nearly doubled in the 1950s, from about 42,000 people to about 77,000, and Kempsville, which had been the county seat from 1778 to 1824, grew quickly through the 1960s and 1970s. The result is a city of about 245 square miles of land where much of the north was built in waves of subdivisions, each with driveways that went down at the same time and are now wearing out together.
In a subdivision of that kind, the same faults turn up at the same address on every street: the seam where the drive meets the garage slab, the joint at the apron, and edges breaking into the lawn where cars cut the corner. Fill and seal those before they open and the drive lasts; leave them and the whole street ends up paving in the same few years.
Pungo is still farm country, one of the seven boroughs the city was divided into in 1963, with its crossroads at Princess Anne and Indian River roads. Out here drives are long, open to the sun all day, and often meet the road over a ditch rather than a curb. A long rural drive greys faster than a shaded suburban one and its edges have nothing holding them up.
Sandbridge sits on a strip between the Atlantic and Back Bay, and lost homes to erosion in the mid-1990s before the beach was rebuilt. Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, in the southeastern corner of the city, dates from 1938. Salt spray and blown sand are part of every job down here, and a drive has to be cleaned right down to bare asphalt before sealing.
Sealing and crack filling a drive behind the sidewalk is not described as right-of-way work. We did not find the current apron permit fee on the city's pages, so it is confirmed and written on the quote at the time.
Rain in Virginia Beach drains three ways, to the Chesapeake Bay, to the Atlantic, or south through the rivers toward Back Bay and North Carolina. Most of the city is flat, and Hurricane Matthew's rain in 2016 flooded more than 2,000 homes. On a driveway the lesson is the same in every watershed: where water stands, the surface and the stone under it weaken. A photo after rain tells us more than any dry-day visit.
If it needs a sidewalk or lane closure, no. The city does not allow that work there from May through September. The drive itself can be sealed; the apron waits for October.
Concrete and asphalt expand differently, so that joint opens on almost every drive. It is filled and sealed with the rest. If the asphalt has dropped below the slab, it needs a patch.
Only if it is left there. Loose sand stops the sealer bonding, so the drive is swept and blown clean to bare asphalt first, edges and cracks included. That prep is part of the job, not an extra.
No. Send the address. Long drives are quoted on the same one price per square foot.
Next door: Norfolk to the west, Chesapeake to the southwest.
