Delaware County, PA Parking Rules: Loading Zones (2026)

Section 195-817D(4) of the Delaware County Subdivision and Land Development Ordinance of 2016 sets the loading-area screening standard inside the chapter's broader parking and loading landscaping rules. Loading areas must be screened to a minimum height of eight feet and the screen must be a complete and effective visual barrier at the time of installation, not merely at maturity years later; the ordinance lets a developer meet that height with plantings, fencing, walls, berms, or a combination of those methods. The same subsection gives the municipality discretion to go further where a loading area abuts a residential use: it can require additional screening and buffering measures, including nighttime and weekend restrictions on loading operations, to cut down on noise, headlight glare and truck traffic near homes.

This loading-area rule sits inside § 195-817's larger parking-lot landscaping package, which requires a five-foot-wide, six-foot-high landscape screen around any parking area of more than five spaces that borders a residential use, one three-inch-caliper shade tree for every five parking spaces, and landscaped islands at least nine feet wide and 18 feet long at the end of parking bays once a lot reaches 20 or more spaces. Because Chapter 195 is the county's default subdivision ordinance under § 195-2, these loading and parking landscaping standards apply automatically to land development plans filed in any Delaware County municipality that has not adopted its own subdivision and land development ordinance; a municipality with its own SALDO sets its own loading-area screening rule instead.