As stormwater runoff from streets and parking lots becomes an ever-more sensitive environmental issue, eliminating it altogether with pervious pavement can be an elegant solution.
Two projects now under way in Connecticut and Minnesota have facilities owners, municipal officials and the paving sector taking notice. One involves a parking lot at a university committed to cutting its impervious surfaces by half. The other is a public road in Minnesota, where a city engineer insists he is not experimenting; he is just applying a best-fit solution to a 50-year-old problem. Both applications share one thing in common: they are engineered to eliminate runoff by drinking all the rain that is likely to fall on the pervious concrete.