Summary & Reader Response Draft 3

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In the article “Porous Asphalt Is King of the Road”, PaveGreen (n.d.) claims that porous asphalt is the best pavement surface. Porous asphalt reduces water pollution as it prevents the washing off of pollutants from surfaces and allows water to be filtered naturally before reaching waterways. It is also used to create safer roads for wet and winter climates. In the event of rain, the prevention of water collection on the surface reduces splash and spray from vehicles. This improves the visibility of drivers therefore decreasing accidents. In winter climates, porous asphalt accelerates the melting of ice and snow. This allows for a cut in the use of anti-icing agents which in turn can potentially lessen winter maintenance costs and pollution from anti-icing agents. The writer also mentions that adopting the use of porous asphalt is a cheap solution for going green considering that the cost is similar to typical asphalt.

The article provides the benefits of using porous asphalt, which supports the claim that porous asphalt is the “king of the road”. I agree that it is superior. In addition to the benefits stated by Pavegreen, noise reduction and prevention of flooding are two other benefits that the author could have included to better support the claim of porous asphalt being the “king of the road”.

One additional benefit of porous asphalt is in its noise reduction capability (Chen, Yang & Lee, 2019). The noise reduction capability of porous asphalt is mainly utilised to reduce the noise created from the interaction between vehicle tires and the road (Tao, Chen, Jiang & Huang, 2017). The material structure of porous asphalt is similar to that of a sponge where there are “air voids” within the material. When sound waves hit the porous asphalt pavement, a portion of it gets reflected back into the environment while the rest is “absorbed” by the porous asphalt through the conversion of sound energy to other forms of energy (Liu, Huang & Xue, 2016). According to Bichajło and Kołodziej (2018), studies have found that vehicles travelling on porous asphalt roads produce lesser noise as compared to when travelling on a more typically used road material, stone matrix asphalt (SMA). A passenger car travelling at 80km/h on a porous asphalt road has been found to have produced 70.1dB of noise, less than when travelling on a SMA road where it produced 75.5dB. Doubling the layer of porous asphalt has shown to reduce a higher level of noise. In areas where houses are within close vicinity of roads and highways, such as Singapore, I feel that the noise reduction characteristic of porous asphalt is especially beneficial in creating a more comfortable living environment.

Another benefit of porous asphalt is that it helps prevent flooding. In well-developed urban areas, a large amount of surface area is impervious as it is covered by concrete. The only way that water can drain off the impervious areas is through the drain. In the event of a heavy downpour, the drains get choked by debris or overloaded and this causes flooding (unitpaving, 2018). The use of porous asphalt helps to mitigate this issue. Porous asphalt allows water to seep through the pavement and drain off below it. This prevents debris from being dragged into drains by the water current, in turn mitigating the choking of drains. According to the Technical Specification for Permeable Bituminous Pavement (2012) (as cited by Zhu, Yu, Zhu, Lu & Cao, 2019), there are three general porous pavement construction namely “drainage surface, permeable pavement and permeable road”, each of which provides a different “water flow path”. In the case of permeable pavement and permeable road, its construction allows water to be stored below the road before getting drained off either into drains or the soil below the road. This prevents the overloading of drains and collection of water above the road surface (Zhu, Yu, Zhu, Lu & Cao, 2019).

In conclusion, Pavegreen elaborated on a few benefits supporting the claim that porous asphalt is the “king of the road”. Providing the additional benefits of noise reduction and flooding prevention would have helped to provide a stronger stand to why porous asphalt is the “king of the road” and why it should be used over other types of road materials.

 

Reference

Bichajło, L., & Kołodziej, K. (2018). Porous asphalt pavement for traffic noise reduction and pavement dewatering – the pollution problem. In VI International Conference of Science and Technology INFRAEKO 2018 Modern Cities. Infrastructure and Environment. https://www.e3s-conferences.org/articles/e3sconf/abs/2018/20/e3sconf_infraeko2018_00114/e3sconf_infraeko2018_00114.html.

Chen, J.-S., Yang, C. H., & Lee, C.-T. (2019). Field evaluation of porous asphalt course for life-cycle cost analysis. Construction and Building Materials, 20–26. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conbuildmat.2019.06.072

Liu, M., Huang, X., & Xue, G. (2016). Effects of double layer porous asphalt pavement of urban streets on noise reduction. International Journal of Sustainable Built Environment, 5(1), 183–196. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijsbe.2016.02.001

PaveGreen. (n.d.). Porous Asphalt Is King of the Road. PaveGreen. http://www.pavegreen.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58:king-of-the-road&catid=35:porous-asphalt&Itemid=110.

Tao, H., Chen, C., Jiang, P., & Huang, S. (2017). Review of Cement Concrete Pavement of Noise Reduction Method. In 13th Global Congress on Manufacturing and Management (GCMM 2016). https://www.matec-conferences.org/articles/matecconf/abs/2017/14/matecconf_gcmm2017_03029/matecconf_gcmm2017_03029.html.

unitpaving. (2018, September 18). HOW PERMEABLE PAVEMENT HELPS PREVENT URBAN FLOODING. Unit Paving Inc. https://unitpaving.com/how-permeable-pavement-helps-prevent-urban-flooding/.

Zhu, H., Yu, M., Zhu, J., Lu, H., & Cao, R. (2019). Simulation study on effect of permeable pavement on reducing flood risk of urban runoff. International Journal of Transportation Science and Technology, 8(4), 373–382. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijtst.2018.12.001

 

Revised 30/11/2020

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