Hillside addresses in Boise, and where a tire van can actually work

Every mobile tire company says it comes to you. Very few say where they cannot work, which in a city that runs from a river flat up into the foothills is the more useful half of the sentence. This page is that half, and it is also an exercise in not inventing a number that a lot of pages about Boise would love to have.

What we need, plainly

• Level ground. Not perfectly flat, but level enough that a jacked car is safe and nothing rolls.
• Paved. Gravel, dirt and grass are not safe to jack a car on. Hardstanding.
• Legal. Your own driveway, your workplace car park with permission, or a legal space. Not a live traffic lane, and not somewhere we will be moved on from halfway through.
• Room at one corner. Not the whole driveway. One corner of the car with room for a technician and a machine.
• Headroom. A carport or a low garage is often the obstacle rather than the slope.

Tell us what you have when you book, including the awkward parts. If we arrive and the space is not safe to work in, that visit is not charged. We would far rather establish it in a two-line message than in your driveway.

Two official slope numbers in this city, set by two bodies for two purposes

Fifteen percent, from the City of Boise. The city's Hillside dataset carries the code definition: Boise Municipal Code section 11-14-02.1 defines hillside areas as "any topographical slope" that "exceeds fifteen percent (15%) or where adverse conditions associated with slope stability, expansion soils, high water table and springs, erosion or sedimentation are present". Read the "or" carefully — it is doing a great deal of work, and we come back to it below.

Six percent, from ACHD. The Ada County Highway District, which owns every street in the county rather than the city doing it, lists its winter priority-one roads as "Arterial and collector roads; Major intersections; Overpasses and bridges; Areas around hospitals and fire stations; School and railroad crossings; Streets with grades (steepness) over six percent." Residential streets, including cul-de-sacs, are priority three.

Six percent is the grade at which this city's road authority treats a street as a winter hazard. It is the only published gradient number in this metro, and it describes a policy rather than a place. It is not a measurement of your street.

What we measured, and exactly what it is not

The city publishes a Hillside overlay — six polygons — and an Ada County Addresses layer of 275,026 address points. Reprojecting the first into the second's own spatial reference and running a point-in-polygon pass over every address point carrying a 837xx ZIP gives the share of each ZIP's addresses that sit inside the designation. All ten Boise-area ZCTAs, ranked, measured 2026-09-20:

ZIP	Addresses inside the Hillside designation	Share
83712	1,841 of 5,266	35.0%
83702	3,126 of 17,362	18.0%
83703	908 of 9,746	9.3%
83716	998 of 11,065	9.0%
83706	336 of 18,469	1.8%
83709	297 of 27,731	1.1%
83714	179 of 16,644	1.1%
83705	97 of 16,810	0.6%
83704	22 of 21,118	0.1%
83713	0 of 13,811	0.0%

Two ZIPs carry almost all of Boise's designated slope. 83712, which holds the East End and Warm Springs Mesa neighbourhood associations, and 83702, which runs from the river flats up through the North End and into Boise Heights and Central Foothills. Between them they hold 4,967 of the 7,804 hillside addresses across those ten ZIPs, which is 63.6 percent (DERIVED: 4,967 divided by 7,804). That ranking is over those ten ZCTAs and no others.

Now the three things that table is not.

It is not a gradient. The designation fires on slope over 15 percent or on slope stability, expansive soils, high water table and springs, erosion or sedimentation. An address inside it may sit on perfectly flat ground with difficult soil. We did not process an elevation model and we did not compute the grade of a single Boise street.

It is not complete outside the city. The layer covers only the Boise Area of Impact, so the 83714 figure understates real terrain in the part of that ZIP that lies beyond the city's planning reach.

It is not a published statistic. The city publishes the polygons and the addresses; the shares are our arithmetic over both, which is why the counts are printed alongside every percentage.

So if you read that some named Boise neighbourhood "averages an X percent grade", or that some street is the steepest in the city, somebody invented it. We are not going to, and we would discount anyone who has.

A bench is not a hill to a fitter with a jack

The Bench is the raised terrace south-west of downtown, and the neighbourhood association names remember it — Central Rim in 83705, Glenwood Rim in 83704. Newcomers assume it is the difficult ground.

The measurement says otherwise: 0.6 percent of 83705's addresses fall inside the Hillside designation, and 0.1 percent of 83704's. A rim is an edge, not a slope field. The streets on top of it are flat, and so are the streets below it. What matters to a jack is the ten feet the car is standing on, not the landform the neighbourhood is named after.

The genuinely flat end of the city is 83713 — West Valley and Centennial — the only one of the ten with a nil count, zero of 13,811 addresses inside the designation.

The data that does not exist, and it is the data everyone wants

The obvious question behind all of this is how many Boise homes have a level paved driveway. Nobody knows.

The American Community Survey carries no garage, driveway or off-street-parking variable, and neither Boise nor ACHD publishes one. The only proxy available is the share of homes that are one-unit detached, and a detached house is not the same thing as a flat paved driveway.

Where that proxy is strongest: 87.8 percent of housing units in 83709 are one-unit detached, against 64.4 percent for the city of Boise. 83713 is 80.3 percent and 83716 is 79.7 percent. Those are housing-type figures and we are labelling them as inferences, not as driveway counts.

At the other end, 9.4 percent of units in 83714 and 6.1 percent in 83704 are mobile homes or other non-standard structures, against 3.1 percent for the city of Boise, 2.8 percent for Ada County and 4.7 percent for the metro. A park pitch and an access lane are a genuinely different working environment from a suburban driveway. We flag it because it changes the conversation at booking, not because anything about those environments has been established here — no park inventory or access description was sourced.

One geography warning for 83714

If your address is 83714, check which city you are actually in before assuming anything on this page applies. Only 29.1 percent of that ZIP's 16,644 addresses fall inside any registered Boise neighbourhood association — Northwest, Pierce Park, Collister, Highlands and Central Foothills between them — against 89 to 100 percent for every other Boise ZIP in this list. The rest is Garden City, a separate incorporated city, plus unincorporated Ada County.

The streets are maintained by ACHD either way; it runs one of its maintenance yards at 3775 N Adams St in Garden City. But a business or a price described as "in Boise" at an 83714 address has usually not been checked.

The names we use

The City of Boise registers 35 neighbourhood associations, described in the city's own dataset as "non-profit organizations primarily composed of land owners representing areas of Boise with a distinct 'style' or 'character'". Those are the only neighbourhood names we will use on a Boise page, because they are the ones the city itself keeps a register of.

On the high ground that means East End and Warm Springs Mesa in 83712; North End, Downtown Boise, West End, Highlands, West Downtown, Central Foothills and Boise Heights in 83702; Collister, Veterans Park and Sunset in 83703; and Southeast Boise, Barber Valley and South Eisenman in 83716.

If the answer is genuinely no

Sometimes it is. A carport with no headroom, a driveway pitched so steeply that a jacked car is not safe, gravel with nothing solid under it. The honest outcome then is that the car goes somewhere flat — a level spot nearby we can meet you at, or one of the fourteen fixed shops in the Tire Rack directory for this metro, which the cost page lists with their published prices and their actual municipalities.

We will tell you that rather than send a van out to discover it.

Where to go next

The winter changeover matters most at exactly the addresses this page is about, since residential streets are the last ACHD clears. The studded tire window has the dates. Idaho inspects nothing has the rest of the law.

For repairs: mobile tire repair in Boise, a flat, a nail, a slow leak, what it costs and who is open today.

Nationally: preparing for a mobile tire visit, a flat in the driveway, a flat at work, mobile versus a tire shop, seasonal changeover and how it works. Our Boise service area covers where we come.

Our price: what the visit costs, whatever the ground

We supply the tires and fit them at your address, one to four in a visit, wheels up to 22 inches, TPMS reset included where the vehicle supports it at the roadside. We do not mount tires bought elsewhere and we do not sell used tires.

A mobile puncture repair is $145 for the first tire and $50 for each additional tire in the same visit. A seasonal changeover is $350 for a set already on its own wheels and $390 for loose tires that have to be mounted and balanced. There is no separate call-out fee in any of those numbers.

If the tire cannot be repaired, the inspection is charged and the repair is not. If the space is not safe to work in when we arrive, nothing is charged — which is the rule that makes it safe for you to book from a hillside address without knowing the answer in advance.

Questions people ask

• My driveway is on a slope. Can you still come? Often. What matters is whether there is a level, paved spot with room to work at one corner of the car, not the average grade of the property. Send a description or a photo when you book.
• How steep is my Boise neighbourhood? Nobody publishes that, and we are not going to estimate it. The only published gradient figure in this metro is ACHD's six percent winter plowing threshold, which describes a policy rather than a place.
• What does the hillside designation mean, then? It is a planning overlay. Boise Municipal Code 11-14-02.1 applies it to slope over 15 percent or to slope stability, expansive soils, high water table and springs, erosion or sedimentation. An address inside it can be flat.
• Which parts of Boise are in it? By our measurement against the city's own layers, 35.0 percent of 83712's addresses and 18.0 percent of 83702's, then 9.3 percent of 83703 and 9.0 percent of 83716. 83713 has none at all. That is a ranking over the ten Boise-area ZIPs and nothing wider.
• Is the Bench a problem? Not for jacking a car. 0.6 percent of 83705's addresses fall inside the designation. A rim is an edge; the ground on either side of it is flat.
• Do I need a garage? No, and a garage or carport is often the obstacle rather than the help, because of headroom. You need level, paved, legal ground with room at one corner of the car.
• What if you turn up and cannot work there? The visit is not charged. That rule exists precisely for addresses where nobody can be sure in advance.