Who permits your driveway, and why it is not the builder

A driveway looks like the simplest thing on a piece of land. It is a strip of gravel or concrete between a road and a house. But it is also a new connection to somebody else's road, and the somebody depends on which road it is. Get the wrong somebody and you will be told to stop, sometimes after the culvert is already in.

There are three possible answers west of Fort Worth, and they are not interchangeable.

If the road is a state highway, the permit is TxDOT's

Farm-to-market roads, US and state highways, and the frontage roads along I-20 are the Texas Department of Transportation's. A new access point onto one of them needs TxDOT's permission before any work starts. The department's own access-management manual names the instrument: Form 1058, a Permit to Construct Access Driveway Facilities. The manual also sets out that the work is inspected, and that TxDOT is to be given 24 hours' notice before construction on the access begins.¹

That is a real lead time, not a formality, and it belongs at the front of a schedule rather than the back. The number and placement of access points onto a highway is a design question TxDOT answers, not a preference the owner states. On a tract with a long frontage this can decide where the driveway goes, which in turn can decide where the house goes.

If the road is a county road, the permit is the commissioner's precinct

Unincorporated Parker County is divided into four commissioner precincts, and each one administers the county roads inside it. This is the answer people most often get wrong, because they go looking for a county building department. Precinct 2's own page puts the rule about as plainly as a government page ever does: "No driveway or utility construction shall be allowed without first obtaining a permit from Precinct 2."²

Precinct 1 publishes the same shape of arrangement from the other direction — road work requests, questions of which roads the county actually maintains, and culvert permitting all run through the precinct office.³

So the practical first question on a county road is not "what does the permit cost" but "which precinct am I in". The precinct that maintains the road in front of the lot is the office that says yes, and a permit from the wrong precinct is not a permit.

The county's construction standards set the shape of it

Parker County's subdivision regulations and construction standards, adopted under Local Government Code chapter 232, carry the physical requirements. Three of them decide most driveways:

• Width. The driveway is to be at least twenty-two feet wide, held at that width to within six feet of the paved portion of the road.⁴
• Spacing. Minimum spacing between driveways runs with the posted speed of the road: 200 feet at 30 mph, 250 feet at 35, 305 feet at 40 and 360 feet at 45.⁴
• The culvert. Culvert sizing is required to be shown on the face of the plat.⁴

Read that last one twice, because it is the one that costs money late. The culvert is not a detail settled by whoever shows up with a skid steer. It is engineering that belongs on the recorded plat, which means it is decided upstream of construction, and changing it afterwards means going back to the document.

The spacing rule is the other quiet one. On a narrow tract between two existing driveways, the spacing minimum can mean there is exactly one place a driveway may go, or that a shared access is the only option. That is worth knowing before an offer, not after.

What the county does not do

It is worth being clear about the limit of county authority, because it surprises people who assume a permit for the driveway implies a permit for the house. Parker County's permitting department states it directly: "Parker County does not issue building permits or certificates of occupancy." What the department does cover is on-site sewage, development in special flood hazard areas, health and safety complaints, and stormwater.⁵

So on unincorporated land you can end up with a driveway permit from the precinct, a septic permit from the permitting department, a floodplain permit if the lot needs one — and no building permit for the house at all, because there is no office that issues one. Two of those are the county's; none of them is a building inspection. For the wider picture of who inspects what, see Who issues your building permit.

The order to do it in

1. Find out who owns the road. If it is a numbered state or US route or an FM road, it is TxDOT's. If it is a county road, it is a precinct's. If the lot is inside a city, it is the city's, and the city's own standards replace the county's.
2. If it is a county road, identify the precinct before anything else.
3. Ask, in writing, what the permit requires and how long it takes. On a state highway, plan around the 24-hour construction notice and the inspection.¹
4. Get the culvert sized by whoever is producing the plat, not by the excavator, and check that the size is on the plat face.⁴
5. Check the spacing against the neighbors' existing driveways at the posted speed of the road.⁴

None of this is difficult. All of it is sequential, and every step of it happens before dirt moves. A driveway that has to be relocated after the culvert is set is one of the more annoying ways to spend money on a build, and it is entirely avoidable by making two phone calls in the right order.

If you are looking at a tract and cannot tell whose road it fronts, that is the first question worth answering, and it is answerable in an afternoon.