National Center for Sustainable Transportation

This paper focuses on successful application of permeable pavement design and performance with special emphasis on stormwater management, water quality benefits, and identification of knowledge and data gaps. The paper provides a summary of the current practice and design methods, discusses the potential application of permeable pavement for highway environment, summarizes the research progress documented in the literature related to mixed design, hydrologic performance, maintenance, water quality benefits, identifies knowledge gaps and unresolved issues, and explores the future direction in permeable pavement application. While there are many successful permeable pavement installations in parking lots and commercial areas with low speed and light traffic loads, only a handful of demonstration projects and simulation studies have evaluated the use of permeable pavements for highways and urban roads with higher vehicle speeds and heavier loads. Those studies and simulations have shown promising results.

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