With three teenage daughters, I cannot seem to stay out of the shoe store. So the other day I took my middle daughter to get some new cross trainers at Designer Shoe Warehouse because one must look fabulous even when working out. And as luck would have it, it was still raining, much as it has most of the summer so far.
The lucky part, though, was that I did not step in a single puddle when waking from the parking lot into the store.
How is that? Semi-Permeable Parking!
No, I did not jump the curb and park the family trickster on the grass—that surely would have been the only time our SUV would have been off road if it were the case.
The reason I did not get my kicks wet was the parking lot in front of the store was made of brick pavers that have a gap filled with crushed rock, allowing all the rain to weep through the surface.
Semi-permeable parking surfaces are actually one of the leading ways to mitigate water run off on commercial properties. Brick pavers are one of the oldest semi-permeable parking surfaces, the oldest though is gravel, but is not durable and practical in a commercial setting as those surfaces need a lot of maintenance.
One of the newest, high-tech systems is a Porous Asphalt system. It looks nearly the same as a normal asphalt lot, but it has much more engineering, with built up gravel base, and underground gutters to divert water into the ground.
Again, it’s a system that keeps the runoff water to a minimum—and my shoes dry!
