Three cars deep on a forty-five mile an hour road
A twenty-six foot box truck turns into a gated office court off a five-lane arterial at half past eight on a Tuesday. The driver has had to swing wide to make the entry, so he arrives with the cab already angled, and he stops where the keypad is — except the keypad was set at car-window height and car-window distance, so by the time his door is level with it the pedestal sits behind his left elbow and four feet below. He puts the truck in park, climbs down, punches the code, climbs back up. Behind him there are two cars in the drive and a third still standing in the through lane with its indicator on.
Nothing on that site is built badly. The apron is sound, the gate is plumb, the operator went in to the manufacturer's instructions and the code works. What went wrong is that the entrance was drawn as an opening in a fence line, and an entrance is not an opening. It is a short piece of ground on which several vehicles stop, at different times, for different reasons, and every one of those stops has to happen somewhere that is not the street, not the footway, and not across the first aisle inside.
Count the stops before anything else. The vehicle standing at the reader. Whatever is queued behind it. The courier with no code who has to be turned around and sent back out, which on a badly drawn entrance means reversing into a through lane. The vehicle straddling the pedestrian route because that is where the driver could reach the keypad. And on the way out, the queue at the exit loop waiting on a leaf that opens at whatever speed the operator manufacturer published. Two questions carry most of it: whether the vehicle can physically make the turn in, and how much drive has to stay empty behind it.
The arrivals that set the dimensions
An entrance is dimensioned by vehicles that turn up rarely and cannot be refused, not by the traffic that uses it every hour. Ask the owner for the delivery schedule and the waste contract, ask the fire code official which apparatus is assigned to the address, and ask on a gated residential scheme what happens on a move-in day — because a household removal lorry is very often the largest vehicle that will ever attempt the entry, and it arrives without warning on a Saturday.
Those questions produce different vehicles, and the mistake is collapsing them into one. The apparatus sets the clear width through the gate and nothing else. The hauler or the removal lorry sets the turn. The peak hour sets the throat, and the peak hour is usually made of cars. Design each against its own vehicle and the entrance comes out honest; design every one of them against the biggest thing on the list and you buy a twenty-six foot gate for a scheme whose real problem was a fifteen second transaction.
| Dimension | Set by | Where it gets checked |
|---|---|---|
| Clear width through the gate opening | The fire apparatus serving the address | The adopted fire code's access road width, agreed with the fire code official before the gate is ordered rather than after |
| Flare and apron radii | The largest vehicle that cannot be turned away — hauler, removal lorry, tractor-trailer at a dock | A swept path overlaid on the plan, entering and exiting, in both turning directions |
| Throat between the through lane and the first conflict | Peak-hour arrivals against what the control point can actually serve | The queue at the design percentile, drawn on the plan with both of its ends marked |
| Reader, intercom and call box position | The tallest cab and the lowest car that both have to reach the same device | Standing at the pedestal with a tape at cab height and again at car window height |
| Turnaround for a vehicle that is refused | Everyone arriving without a code: couriers, contractors, visitors, the wrong delivery | Whether the turn can be made inside the gate line without reversing toward the street |
Turning in off a street you do not control
The turn starts in the carriageway. A truck entering from the near lane needs an entry radius that lets it come round without borrowing the opposing lane or clipping the far side of the drive, and where it cannot, the manoeuvre it makes instead is visible on the plan long before it is visible on site. Check the exit as well, because leaving is the harder turn: the vehicle is accelerating into a gap rather than decelerating into a hole, and the driver's attention is on the traffic rather than on the kerb.
What makes an entrance harder than an aisle inside the lot is that the edges are permanent. In a parking field a truck that clips a corner runs over a kerb and marks it. Here the things sitting a few feet either side of the wheel path are a gate post in a concrete footing, an operator cabinet, a masonry pier with the address on it, the fence line that is the whole point of the gate, and a pedestal the driver has to be able to touch. None of those bends. Overlay both envelopes on all of them: the tyre path pinching inside the turn to eat the flare, and the body envelope swinging outside everything on the ground to reach over a kerb and find the pier.
Then check the gate itself as a moving obstruction rather than as a hole. A swing gate opening inward stands in the throat while it opens, and it sweeps an arc that the vehicle at the reader is often already inside; a driver who creeps forward as soon as the leaf starts to move meets it. A cantilever slide gate is worse in a way that is easier to miss, because the leaf is only clear of the opening once it has travelled the full width, and the vehicle that starts moving at the halfway point arrives at a closing edge. Draw the swept path against the gate in its open position and against the gate mid-travel, not against the empty opening.
Carry a clearance margin, and set it for who actually drives here. A resident makes this turn twice a day and will cut it, so the inside of the flare has to survive being driven on rather than being landscaped. A delivery driver makes it once, at night, in the rain, in a vehicle he collected that morning. Where the entrance serves a dock or a refuse enclosure the single-unit model behind the calculator below stops being enough on its own, because a combination vehicle's trailer off-tracks well inside the tractor and needs its published template from AASHTO's A Policy on Geometric Design of Highways and Streets on the drawing that goes to the authority.
Run the vehicle you named through this — its wheelbase, its front overhang, its angle at full lock — before the gate posts are located, because the band it returns is the ground that has to stay clear of the pier, the pedestal and the operator cabinet, and those three are the objects that get set in concrete first and moved last.
Front axle centre to rear axle centre on the design vehicle.
How far the front wheels can be turned at full lock.
From the front axle centre forward to the foremost point of the body.
Overall width across the body, mirrors excluded.
Added outside the body envelope for driver variation and kerb faces.
Swept path width
17.2 ft
A single-unit bicycle-model turn at steady full lock. It does not model a combination vehicle's trailer off-tracking, a transition into or out of the curve, or superelevation, and it is a check on a published template rather than a replacement for one.
- Inside rear tyre path radius
- 28.26 ft
- Outer body envelope radius
- 45.48 ft
- Turn radius at the rear axle centre
- 32.26 ft
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Design Vehicle Swept Path Calculator: 17.22 ft — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
What this calculation does not cover
- Swept path has height as well as width. A container being tipped, a raised tailgate or an aerial device needs vertical clearance this page says nothing about.
- Trailer off-tracking on a combination vehicle is additional and can be well beyond the tractor's own inside path.
The length of drive that has to stay empty
Throat length is the stretch between the point a vehicle stops being in the street and the first place a stopped vehicle blocks something inside. Both ends fail, differently. A queue reaching the through lane is a safety problem the traffic authority will refuse the plan over, and it is the end everybody draws. A queue reaching the first aisle traps every car already parked and produces the reversing manoeuvre — out of a stall, into a stationary line of waiting vehicles — that quietly fills a site's incident log. One dimension answers both, so either both are solved or neither is.
Sizing it needs a service rate, and the service rate is almost never the one assumed at design. It is not the transaction time. It is the whole cycle: the dwell at the reader while a code is entered or a transponder is read, the operator's start delay, the leaf travelling far enough for the vehicle to pass, the vehicle accelerating through, and — if the gate closes between vehicles rather than holding open on a queue — the close and re-open before the next one is served. Take the leaf speed from the operator manufacturer's published data and divide the clear opening by it; on a wide slide gate that one number is often the binding constraint rather than anything the driver does. A call box answered by a receptionist who also has a desk job belongs in the arithmetic at the rate it actually achieves.
Drive it with the peak hour, never a daily total spread across the day: schools, shift-change industrial sites and event venues deliver most of a day's arrivals inside a few minutes, which is the condition the throat exists for. Watch what that does to the sensitivity — a tenant change adding twenty vehicles to a peak hour can double a throat requirement that was adequate for a decade, and past the point where demand exceeds what the gate can serve the answer stops being pavement and becomes a second lane, transponders for the regulars, or an exit-only second access.
Draw the result rather than quoting it. The local access management standard sets the minimum throat and the design percentile for the road class, and the authority will usually measure from the right of way line while the physical problem starts at the through lane, so the two ends have different owners and want marking separately. Give the exit side the same treatment: a site where everyone leaves within fifteen minutes of five o'clock can hold a queue behind its own free-exit loop that reaches back past the last aisle.
Run the peak arrival count against the service rate you measured — cycle time, not transaction time — and read the length back against the plan with both ends marked: the through lane at one end, the first aisle or the pedestrian route at the other.
Vehicles entering during the busiest hour of a design day.
How many vehicles the gate, kiosk or window can process each hour.
How often the design queue is allowed to be exceeded.
Vehicle plus the gap a stopped driver leaves in front of them.
Extra length for the longest vehicle expected to be served at the control point.
Throat length required
162 ft
A steady-state single-server model. Real arrivals cluster, service times vary, and a queue that reaches the street is a different problem from one that reaches the first aisle — check both ends against the plan.
- Design queue
- 6 vehicles
- Demand against capacity
- 0.6 ratio
- Storage applied per queued vehicle
- 25 ft
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Driveway Throat Queue Length Calculator: 162 ft — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
What this calculation does not cover
- Two failure directions share one dimension: a queue that spills into the street, and a queue that blocks the first aisle so parked drivers cannot leave. Both are measured from the same throat.
- Nothing here checks the curb return radius, the apron cross slope, or the pedestrian route that crosses the drive.
Where the driver's window stops
A pedestal has three dimensions and a side, and the side is what gets lost when a drawing crosses the Atlantic. Distance from the gate has to leave the waiting vehicle clear of a swinging leaf's arc and clear of any safety loop that would otherwise hold the gate open on it. Height is the real problem, because a car window and a truck cab are nowhere near the same level; the honest answers are a gooseneck arm reachable from both or two devices on one post, and the wrong answer is the one that makes a driver climb down at every visit. Lateral offset has to put the device inside an arm's reach, which is much shorter than it looks once there is a raised kerb, a drainage channel or a February snowbank between the tyre and the post.
Where a device sits on a pedestrian route it stops being a vehicle control and becomes operable parts. The ADA Standards for Accessible Design set reach ranges and operable-parts requirements for anything on an accessible route, and a visitor intercom people walk up to is exactly that, even when the keypad six inches above it on the same post is reached only from a car. It is the pedestrian gate release and the visitor call button that get mounted at whatever height suited the vehicle device, and they are the ones the standard actually reaches.
Everything at an entrance gets hit eventually. The pedestal is in the swept path by definition, because the driver has to reach it; the operator cabinet sits beside the leaf where a reversing trailer finds it; the gate post takes the corner the tyre path pinched. Protection is bollards, and there is a difference between a bollard and a post: one that stops a vehicle is a tested product, to ASTM F2656 Standard Test Method for Crash Testing of Vehicle Security Barriers where a rating is genuinely needed or ASTM F3016 Standard Test Method for Surrogate Testing of Vehicle Impact Protective Devices at Low Speeds for the ordinary low-speed case. A pipe filled with concrete is a wheel stop with ambitions. Where protection runs along a length — the fence line beside the gate, a frontage facing the drive, the exposed side of an equipment pad — spacing is what makes it a barrier rather than a decoration, and it still has to leave a gap somebody on foot can walk through.
- Park the design vehicle where its driver will stop, gate closed, bumper at the point the leaf can still open in front of it.
- Mark the driver's window on the ground from the cab, not from the drawing, then repeat with an ordinary car and record both heights.
- Set the pedestal so both drivers reach it with an arm out, from the position each of them actually stops in.
- Run the leaf, and check it against the vehicle standing at that position.
- Only then site the bollards — outside the swept path, not inside the drive where they become the thing that gets hit.
For the runs rather than the singles: take the length that has to be closed to a vehicle — the fence line beside the gate, the equipment pad, the frontage facing the drive — and a spacing tight enough to stop a vehicle passing between, and it returns the count including the post at each end.
The total length of frontage or opening to be protected by bollards.
The on-center spacing between bollards.
Bollards needed
15 bollards
- Bays between bollards
- 14
- Bollard centres, as installed
- 4.71 ft
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Security Bollard Spacing Calculator: 15 bollards — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Estimated cost — your price
This site holds no price list for this material — local prices vary too much to publish honestly. Enter your supplier's price and the result is costed with it.
What this calculation does not cover
- Spacing is handled as an on-centre dimension only, with no bollard diameter anywhere in the division, so the clear opening left between two adjacent units is narrower than the figure you enter by one shaft width, and nothing in the arithmetic tests that remaining gap for pedestrian, pram or wheelchair passage.
- The centres above are the installed ones, not the target you typed: rounding the interval count up before the end unit is added pulls them in tighter, so 20 m (66 ft) at 1.5 m (5 ft) is fourteen bays at about 1.43 m (4.7 ft). Set the line out from that figure rather than from the target, and read it against the clear opening above, which is the tighter of the two.
- The layout assumed is one continuous straight run with a bollard landing on each end, so frontage that turns a corner, follows a curve or butts into an existing wall or pier has to be measured as separate straight segments with the shared end units then deducted from the total.
- No allowance is made for a deliberate break in the line, such as a vehicle entrance, a loading bay or a service crossing fitted with a removable or retractable unit, because every position across the frontage is counted as one fixed bollard.
- Only the bollard count comes back: footing concrete, embedment or sleeve depth, baseplate fixings and the paving reinstatement around each position are quantities these two inputs cannot produce.
The gate is a machine, and it has a standard
A powered gate is machinery that lives outdoors, moves in public and is worked by people with no training in it. Two documents cover it in North America — UL 325, the Standard for Door, Drapery, Gate, Louver, and Window Operators and Systems, for the operator, and ASTM F2200 Standard Specification for Automated Vehicular Gate Construction, for the gate the operator drives — and they are separate purchases, frequently from separate suppliers. A compliant operator on a non-compliant gate is not a compliant installation.
UL 325 sorts operators into usage classes by who uses the gate rather than by how big it is — broadly, single residential, general commercial and multi-family, industrial with limited access, and restricted access under supervision. The class drives the entrapment protection required, so a gate serving an apartment block is not a residential gate merely because the building is residential. What the standard wants is an inherent means built into the operator, which senses an obstruction and reverses, plus an independent secondary means at each place a person could be trapped: photo eyes across the path, or edges on the leaf. In service it is the secondary means that fails, and it fails silently in the safe direction — a photo eye out of alignment, dazzled by low sun, webbed over or blocked by a snow bank holds the gate open, which the client reports as a security fault rather than as a safety device doing its job.
ASTM F2200 governs the gate itself, and most of it is about what a person can reach: exposed rollers, gaps in and around a moving leaf within reach of somebody standing at it, positive stops at both ends of a slide gate's travel so the leaf cannot leave its track, and the principle that a vehicular gate is for vehicles while pedestrians need their own gate on their own path. That last one is a design instruction, not a warning sticker. Where there is no pedestrian gate, people walk through the vehicle opening.
Two spatial requirements come out of the gate type and both have derailed jobs at installation. A cantilever slide gate needs the opening width again behind the opening and then the counterbalance tail beyond that, all of it on a straight, level, clear run — so the space to find is the manufacturer's overall gate length, not the opening width, and assuming the two are the same is how a retaining wall, a hedge, a transformer pad or a rising bank gets discovered with the gate already on the truck. A swing gate needs its arc clear in three dimensions, which on a drive that rises away from the street means the leaf has to be hung to clear a surface that is climbing toward it, or it binds a few degrees before it is open. Neither is a detail; both change where the gate line can go.
Outside North America the same machine is regulated as machinery: in the United Kingdom and the European Union a powered gate is placed on the market against the product standard BS EN 13241, with safety in use in BS EN 12453 and mechanical requirements in BS EN 12604, and force limitation is demonstrated with a measuring instrument rather than by opinion. Enforcement attention there sharpened after two children were killed by automatic gates in 2010, and the guidance published since by the Door and Hardware Federation and by Gate Safe is the practical reading of it. Buy against the duty as well — an entrance cycling four hundred times a day is an industrial duty whatever the site is called.
Power at the far end of the site
The operator is at the gate. The panel is in the building, or in a kiosk, or three hundred feet away in a plant room, and the run between them is the line item left out of the price and impossible to correct once the apron is poured. Size the conductor on the length of the run rather than on the breaker. Voltage drop appears in the National Electrical Code as an informational note — the familiar three percent on the branch circuit, five percent overall — so it fails no inspection and nothing enforces it, while a motor at the end of a long undersized run starts hot, runs slow and is replaced years early. On a gate cycling all day that is a maintenance contract nobody agreed to.
The trench is a one-chance item. Line voltage and the low-voltage side go in separate raceways; loop lead-ins are twisted and kept in their own conduit or they pick up noise from the power run and report detections that are not there. Cover comes from the NEC's minimum cover requirements for direct-buried conductors and raceways, which vary with what is above them and are deeper under a driveway than under grass. Pull a spare conduit while the trench is open: it costs a length of pipe, and it is the difference a year later between adding a camera and saw-cutting a finished apron to do it.
Loops need their own thinking. In asphalt they are saw-cut after the base course and before the top lift where the sequence allows; in concrete they go into the finished slab with the joint layout in front of you, because a loop taken across a moving joint breaks there and the fault reads as an intermittent gate. Keep each loop inside one panel. The layout is typically a free-exit loop out in the drive, a safety or shadow loop in the path of the leaf so the gate cannot close on a stopped vehicle, and a reset loop past the gate line — and the loop that holds the gate open on a queue is the one that decides whether the throat calculation was optimistic.
Take the one-way distance from the panel to the operator and the operator's running current from its data plate, and check the drop before the trench is dug — this is the number that decides the conductor size, and the trench is open for one afternoon.
Copper, or aluminum — the metal printed on the jacket (CU or AL).
The size printed on the jacket: an AWG number up to 4/0, then kcmil.
Single phase — including a 240 V circuit and DC — or a balanced three-phase circuit.
The distance from the panel to the load, one direction only.
The expected current draw of the load in amps.
The nominal circuit voltage — line to line for three phase.
Voltage drop
1.936 V
- Voltage drop
- 1.61 %
- Voltage at the load
- 118.06 V
- K constant, Ω·cmil per ft
- 12.9
- Conductor area, circular mils
- 6,530
They open the calculator with your figures already in it
Wire Gauge Voltage Drop Calculator (Copper or Aluminum, AWG to 1,000 kcmil): 1.94 V — shown in imperial, US market. The link sets both, so the result they see is the one on your screen.
Add the equipment this sizes
This result is a specification — 1.936 V — not a quantity. Put the thing it sizes into your project: how many, what you call it, and your supplier’s price.
What this calculation does not cover
- VOLTAGE DROP IS NOT AMPACITY, and the two are different questions with different answers. A conductor can stay inside the 3% suggestion and still be too small to carry the current without overheating, and it can be thermally adequate and still drop too much over a long run. Both checks have to be made, and only one of them is made here.
- The K constants are DC resistance at 75 °C (167 °F) for uncoated copper and for aluminum, the basis of NEC Chapter 9 Table 8. The table's size-by-size resistances differ from the single constant by a percent or so either way, and the table is not reproduced here. A conductor running cooler drops a little less and one at a 90 °C (194 °F) rating a little more; tinned (coated) copper has its own, slightly higher resistance.
- Treats the circuit as resistive, which is close for lighting, heating and most branch circuits. On a large AC feeder, and above all one in steel conduit feeding an inductive load, the conductor's reactance adds to the drop and the power factor matters; Table 9 of the same chapter carries the AC figures and is not reproduced here.
- Three phase assumes a balanced load and gives the drop between lines. A single-phase load taken from one line to neutral of a three-phase supply is a single-phase circuit: choose single phase and the line-to-neutral voltage.
- Aluminum conductors need terminations and devices listed for them; the code does not let dissimilar metals be joined except in a device listed for the purpose. Nothing here checks a termination, a lug or a splice.
- The 3% and 5% figures are suggestions in the code's informational notes rather than requirements, though a local amendment, an equipment maker's instructions or a specification can make a tighter figure binding.
The morning the power is out and the ambulance is at the gate
Emergency access is agreed with the fire code official in writing, before the gate is ordered, and it is not a formality: the International Fire Code's Section 503 provisions on fire apparatus access roads require a security gate across such a road to be approved, and the code's key box provisions are how the department gets through it. The means available are an approved key box or key switch, a siren-actuated or radio-actuated receiver, or an override wired to the alarm panel. Which is acceptable is genuinely local — two departments in one county will take different views — and NFPA 1, Fire Code carries the same subject where that is the adopted document. Settling it late is expensive, because the answer sometimes changes the operator specification.
What the gate does when the power fails is a decision somebody has to make, not a default that arrives in the box. Fail-open releases the leaf so it can be pushed clear, which suits a site whose real risk is people trapped inside; fail-secure with a battery keeps the perimeter, and suits a site whose risk is the opposite. Either way every operator has a manual release, and a release is worthless if it sits behind the gate, needs a key kept in an office that closes at six, or is a crank nobody on site has ever turned. Hand the owner a written procedure with a photograph in it rather than a page of the installation manual.
The pedestrian side has its own trap. A perimeter gate can find itself standing on an exit route from a building, and anything on a means of egress opens from the inside without a key, a tool or special knowledge — the adopted building code's egress provisions treat a gate in a fence as they treat a door in a wall. Establish whether the walk through your entrance is somebody's exit discharge before the pedestrian gate gets a padlock.
Levels, the walk, and where the water goes
The apron carries a vehicle from the crown of the street to whatever level the gate stands on, and it does it in a series of grade breaks rather than in one slope. Vehicles ground on the break, not on the gradient: a low car catches its nose where the gutter meets the apron, a long wheelbase catches its belly on the crest where the apron flattens. Walk the profile with a stringline before anything is poured. The one length that has to be genuinely flat is where the vehicle stands at the reader, and the operator's own pad wants to be level too, because a slide gate on a pad that has settled runs heavy on one roller and eats it.
The footway does not tip to suit the drive. Where a pedestrian route crosses an entrance it keeps its own grade and the driveway absorbs the difference in the flares and behind the walk, which is what the Public Right-of-Way Accessibility Guidelines are getting at in holding the route's cross slope across a driveway crossing. Sight lines belong to the same paragraph, because everything an entrance wants — a masonry pier, a solid gate leaf, a hedge, a sign with the address on it — sits precisely in the triangle between a driver waiting to pull out and a person walking along the frontage. Solid infill on a leaf is the usual culprit, and the fix is normally to move the pier rather than to argue about the hedge.
Then the water, which is a condition of most access permits: private drainage may not discharge onto the highway, so the apron falls back into the site or into a channel drain across the drive at the boundary, and that channel needs a destination sized for the ground rather than a tee into the nearest pipe. There is a second reason to want it there. The low point of a gated entrance is exactly where every vehicle stops, which makes it exactly where a sheet of ice forms, and a slide gate whose track collects grit and meltwater is a winter service call every single year.
Drive it before the top lift
Chalk the swept path onto the base course and drive the real vehicle through it. Haulers will generally send a truck for an hour if asked, and that hour before the surface course goes down is worth more than any amount of overlay work on a drawing. Do it with the gate frame set and something standing where the pedestal will be, even if that something is a stake with a board screwed to it at the height the arm will sit. What you are watching for is not whether it fits, but where the driver looks, where he stops, and how many bites he takes at the turn.
Then time the gate. Ten cycles, stopwatch from the moment a vehicle stops at the reader to the moment it is clear of the opening, with a car and again with the largest vehicle, and take the worst rather than the mean. That is the service rate the throat was supposed to be sized on, and where it comes in much slower the correction belongs in the layout rather than in the operator settings, where the only thing left to shorten is a safety delay that exists for a reason.
Hand over what the next person needs. The operator manual and the written release procedure; the usage class and which entrapment devices sit at which zone; the key box arrangement as agreed with the fire department; a marked-up drawing of every loop cut, so the contractor resurfacing the drive in eight years does not saw through one; where the spare conduit runs; and the swept path drawing the entrance was laid out from. In service the two things that break are a photo eye and a loop, and the one thing that gets rebuilt is the flare the trucks have been cutting since the day it opened.
What an entrance gets priced from
An entrance is quantified as geometry long before it is quantified as materials, and the geometry has four owners: the highway authority, the fire code official, the operator manufacturer and the owner's own delivery schedule. Settle these six, in this order, and the concrete follows.
- Design vehicle data, not a remembered radius — Wheelbase, front overhang, body width and lock angle for the class you actually named — from the published class, from the owner's hauler, or from the fire department for apparatus.
- Throat length with both ends marked — Measured from the through lane at one end and to the first aisle, pedestrian route or dock turn at the other; the authority will measure from the right of way line, which is a third position again.
- Gate clear opening and leaf travel time — Opening width agreed with the fire code official; travel time taken from the operator manufacturer's published leaf speed, because it is an input to the service rate and not a comfort figure.
- Cantilever run or swing arc, on clear level ground — A slide gate needs the opening width again behind it plus its counterbalance, so take the overall gate length from the manufacturer; a swing gate needs its arc in three dimensions on a drive that may be rising. Check both against the fence line, the bank and the equipment pad.
- Trench, conduit and loops before the base course — Conductors sized on the run rather than the breaker, loop lead-ins twisted in their own raceway, cover to the code's minimums under a driveway, and one spare pipe across the drive.
- Impact protection where anything can be struck — Pedestal, operator cabinet, gate post and any run beside the drive — with a tested product where the rating matters rather than a filled pipe.
Opens the calculators above on one screen with the dimensions from this article already filled in. Quantities only — this site publishes no price list, because local prices vary too much to publish honestly.