A swing gate lives or dies on two things: whether there is room for the leaf to travel, and whether the posts holding it up were set deep enough. Everything else — the picket pattern, the powder coat colour, the lock — is decoration on top of those two decisions. Before anything gets fabricated, someone should stand at your opening with a tape and watch where the gate goes when it opens. Driveways in Vernon and the surrounding blocks of Huntington Park and Bell often rise from the sidewalk to the slab, and a gate that clears the ground at the closed position can drag hard once it swings uphill. The fixes are known ones: swing the gate outward instead of in, raise the bottom rail and accept a larger ground gap, split a wide opening into two leaves so each one travels less, or use rising-butt hinges that lift the leaf as it opens. What you don't want is to find out about the slope after the steel is welded.
Most sagging gates were never really gate problems. They were post problems. A swing gate hangs entirely off one side, so every bit of its weight is trying to pull the hinge post over toward the opening. That post needs a concrete footing sized to the gate it carries, and on a wide or solid-infill driveway gate that means a deeper, wider hole than people expect. Where there is an existing block or stucco wall, hinges are sometimes anchored straight into it — that can work if the wall is solid and the anchors are the right ones, and it fails slowly and expensively if the wall is hollow block with no grout in the cells. Ask what the posts are going into and how long the concrete will cure before the gate is hung. A good crew will set posts, come back, and hang. The jobs that come loose within a year are usually the ones hung the same hour the concrete went in.
A pedestrian gate changes the problem rather than shrinking it. It is lighter and narrower, so the footing demand drops, but it gets used dozens of times a day and the hardware takes a beating a driveway gate never sees. Latch height, which way it swings relative to the walkway, whether it self-closes, whether it can be opened from the street at all — those matter more than the steel does. For a side yard or a front walk, people usually want a key or thumb-turn from outside and free egress from inside. For a commercial yard in Vernon, the pedestrian gate next to the rolling or swing driveway gate is often the one that has to open for employees all day, which means an electric strike or maglock with a request-to-exit device, a keypad or fob reader, and a run of low-voltage cable back to a power source. If the gate is also a required exit from the building or the yard, it has to open in the direction of travel with no key needed from the inside — worth settling before fabrication, not after.
Width and leaf count first: a 16-foot opening done as two swing leaves costs more in hinges, posts, drop rod and a cane bolt receiver set into the driveway than a single 3-foot pedestrian gate. Then infill — open pickets use the least steel, horizontal tube and perforated or solid sheet use far more and catch wind, which pushes you toward heavier hinges and deeper footings. Then finish: shop primer and paint is the cheap end, hot-dip galvanizing then powder coat is the long end, and in these yards the thing that actually eats a gate is a sprinkler head throwing water at the bottom rail every morning. Add demolition and disposal of an old gate, concrete cutting for footings in a paved driveway, and electrical work if you are automating. A swing operator brings its own list: arm or ram style, 120V or solar, photo eyes, and a safe stopping behaviour when something is in the path.
Before you book, ask to see the gate drawn or at least dimensioned, with post locations marked on your actual driveway. Ask what gauge and section the frame uses, how the hinges adjust once it is hung, whether the latch is reachable from both sides, and who comes back to adjust it after a few weeks of settling. A gate that was measured properly closes with one hand and latches without lifting. One that wasn't will need a knee under it for the rest of its life.