Why Do People Cut Lines In Concrete Driveways?

When you have a home with a concrete driveway leading to your garage, it's rarely ever just one giant slap of concrete outside your home. That driveway is going to be broken up into sections, thanks to carefully designed saw cuts. If you're just looking at it, this seems like it could just be a purely aesthetic decision. Having one continuous slab of concrete could look a little plain or — if you have a particularly large driveway — rather overwhelming. While there are certainly cosmetic advantages to having saw cuts in your concrete driveway, there are practical benefits of this design choice as well.

Out of all the issues that can plague a concrete driveway, one of the more infuriating ones is cracking. There are many reasons why concrete can crack, but there are ways to prevent it from happening. One such was is by creating these saw cuts in the concrete. In a way, these cuts pre-crack your driveway. While regular cracks are jagged and random, these saw cuts can direct any potential future cracks to predetermined locations in order to keep your driveway looking spiffy, even if it's undergone some significant wear and tear. 

To make matters better, having these cuts actually decreases the chance that the concrete will even crack in the first place. Having a place for the cracks to go is just a nice bonus. While the aesthetic benefits are evident, this is mostly to protect the longevity of your driveway, as you don't want to have degrading concrete that can be a safety hazard, and that you eventually need to repair or completely reinstall.

While there is a cheap fix for cracked concrete, having saw cuts helps reduce and maneuver cracking in a couple specific ways. The first is targeting weak spots in your concrete's foundation. Ideally, you would have a perfectly installed driveway that is strong, firm, and even across the board, but that's a very tough thing to manage when you consider the weight being pushed onto the concrete and the environmental factors it contends with.

Concrete is also a surprisingly malleable substance when it's dried. Like many other substances, it's subject to change depending on the climate — temperature, humidity, and other environmental factors can either expand or contract it. This can disrupt the internal structure of the concrete and cause a significant amount of stress, eventually leading to cracks. 

When you have cut lines in the driveway, you're also directing potential stressors to these cuts, allowing the expanding and contracting to happen there instead of all around the driveway. If the concrete starts to crack, they will once again be hidden within the saw cuts, and the structural integrity of your driveway on the whole will remain strong. There are so many benefits to having planned saw cuts in your concrete driveway, that there's little reason not to have them.