BEST PRACTICES OF POROUS ASPHALT PAVING
BY SARAH REDOHL
W
Experts share best practices for performing porous asphalt paving, from project planning to maintaining the road well after it’s paved. When Bruce Barkevich received a call from the Lake George Association (LGA) about using porous asphalt on a local project, he was initially concerned about how a permeable pavement would perform under the roadway’s conditions. The association board members hoped to use porous asphalt on Beach Road, located on the south end of the pristine Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. However, the project presented a number of obstacles for its use. LGA, Warren County, and the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District teamed up with Barton & Loguidice (B&L), D.P.C., Albany, New York, to research the feasibility of implementing a porous roadway along Beach Road. Some of the major constraints were that the water table beneath the road was higher than typically seen for permeable pavement projects; porous asphalt is not usually recommended if the water table is less than 48 inches beneath the bottom of the reservoir
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stone layer. Additionally, sediment from a nearby stream that often flooded could clog the porous pavement. Lastly, Beach Road receives more traffic than the types of roads for which the state had used porous asphalt in the past, with a total average daily traffic count of 8,600 with 5 percent being heavy truck traffic.
The project team worked with the NYS Environmental Facilities Corporation (NYS EFC) and was awarded a Green Innovations Grant to help offset the additional costs of design and construction of what was to be a Heavy Duty version of porous asphalt with the capacity to accommodate the variable lake elevation water table depths and the heavier traffic loading. “New York, and specifically the capital district, has been doing porous pavements going back into the 1970s,” Barkevich said. In the state’s early days of porous asphalt, its application was limited to parking lots. However, Barkevich said, recent successes using porous pavements on residential and road projects have expanded its use.
