Pervious concrete pavements are becoming popular in the Pacific Northwest and other areas with cold winter months. This pavement system’s high permeability offers advantages in stormwater management and can reduce flash urban flooding in areas with high rain volume.

While offering several benefits in urban areas, we know very little about pervious concrete pavement’s surface skid resistance under wet, icy and snowy and even dry conditions. In a project funded by the Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans), we are empirically quantifying the surface condition of pervious concrete pavements in terms of skid resistance under those critical conditions and also when treated with deicers.

Our initial experiments (see the photo) showed a significant influence induced by the number of pores in the pervious concrete on the surface skid resistance. Next, we are characterizing skid resistance on a large database of slabs with a wide range of porosity.