Insights

Is a Second Driveway Entrance Worth It?

Usually the answer is a turning area instead, and it is worth understanding why before spending on the version that involves the road.

Updated October 2026 · Pleasant Prairie Concrete

People ask for a second entrance for one of three reasons: they are tired of reversing into traffic, they want separate access to a garage or outbuilding, or they want the sweep of a circular drive. Those are different problems and only one of them genuinely needs a second crossing of the public road.

The cost is not the concrete

This is the thing to understand first, because it explains a number that otherwise looks wrong.

A second entrance is a second piece of work in the right-of-way. That means a second permitted approach, built to the municipal specification rather than to yours, inspected on its own terms, with its own kerb work at the street.

So the price does not track the extra square footage. It carries a fixed regulatory package that arrives at full size regardless of how modest the job is. What the Village requires of whoever works on that ground:

Requirement	Level
Surety bond	$10,000
Liability insurance	$300,000
Licensing	Required
Permit	Required

Nothing in that table gets smaller because your project is. A single narrow entrance meets it in full, exactly as a wide one would.

That also means the permission question comes first. The Village zoning code does not grant a second opening as of right: section 420-46 leaves it to the Zoning Administrator, and it adds spacing and road-type conditions a given lot may or may not meet. Get that decision before any design exists, because everything downstream depends on it.

The cheaper answer to the usual problem

If the motivation is not wanting to reverse into the road, a turning area does the same job entirely on your own land.

No permit for the manoeuvring space itself, no second approach, no kerb work, no second crossing to maintain for the next thirty years. The concrete goes where you want it rather than where a specification puts it.

It needs genuine room, which is the honest limitation, and the area required is usually larger than people estimate. The test is the same one worth applying to any parking question: take the largest vehicle that regularly uses the drive and try the manoeuvre with a marker where the new edge would be. If it works with room to spare, this is the answer and it is substantially cheaper.

When a second entrance genuinely is right

• Separate access to an outbuilding that cannot sensibly be reached from the existing drive, particularly where a workshop or storage building sits on a different part of the frontage.
• A genuinely long frontage where the two entrances serve different parts of the property and neither duplicates the other.
• Where the existing entrance is in the wrong place for visibility or safety, in which case the useful conversation is usually about moving it rather than adding to it.
• A circular drive on a property with the frontage for it, where the sweep is the point and a turning area does not achieve it.

Notice that the last one is the only case where appearance is the reason, and it is a legitimate reason. It is worth being clear with yourself about whether that is what you are buying, because it changes how you would feel about the figure.

What it does to the front of the house

A second entrance changes the elevation of the property as seen from the road, and that is worth picturing before it exists rather than after.

Two crossings means two breaks in whatever runs along the frontage, a hedge, a wall, a verge, a line of planting. It also means more hard surface visible from the street and less of whatever was there instead, and on a modest frontage the result can read as a forecourt rather than as a garden with a drive in it.

Sometimes that is exactly right, particularly on a wide plot where a circular sweep suits the house. On a narrower one it is the point at which people wish they had spent the money on a turning area behind the building line instead, where it does the same job and nobody sees it.

The ongoing consequences nobody mentions

A second entrance is a second piece of concrete meeting the road, and everything that happens to the first one happens to it too.

It takes road salt directly. It takes the heaviest vehicles that come near your property. It is in the right-of-way, so when it eventually needs work that work is permitted, specified and inspected rather than something you simply arrange. And there is more hard surface shedding water, which has to go somewhere.

None of that is a reason not to do it. It is a reason to count it as two long-term commitments rather than one project.

How we would approach the decision

Ask the Village first whether it is permitted at all. Then price the turning area as the alternative rather than as a fallback, because on most suburban lots it solves the actual problem for considerably less.

If the answer still comes out as a second entrance, treat the approach as the centre of the project rather than a detail at the end of it. The rules that govern that section are in the Pleasant Prairie approach rules, and how the whole drive should sit on the land is in why driveway slope matters.

For the cost of adding area on your own ground, see what extra parking adds. The work is on concrete driveway, and the visit to walk the frontage and try the turn costs nothing.