How to Get the Most For Your Dollar Of Condominium Pavement
Maintaining the paved surfaces of condominium roadways and parking lots can easily be the biggest consumer of your association’s budget. Here are four ways that should help you get the most for your pavement dollar:
1. Provide good positive drainage of the paved surfaces.
2. Make sure you have a stabile well draining sub-base.
We’re assuming that your condominium roads and parking lots are surfaced with bituminous concrete. This flexible product is a mixture of an asphaltic binder with ground up stone and sand aggregate. It helps to remember that all the work of transmitting vehicle wheel loads down to the sub-base is done by the aggregate. The asphalt is simply the “glue” that stabilizes the aggregate in place so it can do its job.
While that may be a nice structural solution, the arrangement leaves tiny void spaces between the pieces of aggregate. Surface water that does not evaporate can find its way down into and through these passages eventually entering the sub-base where it can begin the business of deterioration over time. The quickest way to intercept that process is to provide positive drainage off the paved surfaces to the shoulders or into catch basins. The sooner it gets off the pavement, the better.
So if there are “bird bath” depressions that pool water, fill them in with binder. If the pooling area is more extensive, cold planning may provide the pitch you need to get the water to move. A good gravel sub-base is the best warranty for long pavement life. It should be a coarse material with generous voids between its granules to allow water to flow through it and go somewhere else other than accumulate beneath your roadway.
If the sub-base is of unsuitable material with clay or construction debris in it (it happens) you will be wasting money paving over it year after year. The optimum, “root canal”, solution is to excavate down, remove the offending material and replace it with good clean gravel. Now you have both management mechanisms in place. Positive drainage of the major portion of surface water coupled with the ability of your sub-base to effectively handle the remainder is the key to long pavement service life.
