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Parking lot in the Finnish city of Kotka.
The usual parking lot in the United States is paved with asphalt. Some are paved with concrete. Many are gravel lots. A few of the newer lots are surface with permeable paving materials.
Parking lots have their own special type of engineering. While parking lots have traditionally been an overlooked element of development projects by governmental oversight, the recent trend has been to provide regulations for the configuration and spacing of parking lots, their landscaping, and drainage and pollution abatement issues.
Parking lots have certain characteristics that set them apart from roadways in terms of their engineering and operating requirements. The first is that they often cover large contiguous areas with impermeable paving surface. This means that virtually all of the rain (minus evaporation) that falls becomes runoff. The parking lot must be built to effectively channel and collect that runoff. Traditionally, the runoff has been shunted directly into storm sewers, streams, or even sanitary sewers. However, most larger municipalities now require retention basins to catch runoff to reduce the stress on sewer systems or streamways.
Parking lots also tend to be subject to contamination with concentrated spots of pollutants such as motor oil. While motor vehicles on roadways may drip oil, they do so over a large area. Oil drips on parking lots are concentrated enough that they can have a deleterious effect on the water quality of the runoff. Other pollutants, even brake-lining dust, rustThis article is about the type of corrosion. For the fungus, see rust (fungus). For the person, see Mathias Rust. For the town in Austria, see Rust, Austria. Rust is the substance formed when iron compounds corrode in the presence of water and oxygen. particles, and other particulate materials that settle on the parking lot surface, can be a similar problem. Therefore, an important second function of the retention basin for parking lots is to act as a temporary storage impoundment to allow particulate materials to settle out and to slow or even prevent the release of other pollutants into waterwayA waterway is any navigable body of water. These include rivers, lakes, oceans, and canals. In order for a waterway to be navigable, it must meet several criteria: The waterway must be deep enough to allow the draft depth of the vessels using it; The wates.
In some places, the water is not channeled into retention basins, but into dry wellDry well refers to an underground storage facility for water, typically storm water runoff. Simple dry wells consist of a pit full of rocks or other debris. More complex dry wells may be made of plastic or concrete. They have holes in the sides and bottoms.
An alternative solution today is to use permeable paving surfaces, such as brickA brick is a block made of kiln-fired material, usually clay or ground shale. Clay bricks are formed in a moulding (the soft mud method), or in commercial manufacture more frequently by extruding clay through a die and then wire-cutting them to the proper, stoneRock is a substance composed of minerals and classified according to mineral composition. Rocks are generally clasified by the processes that formed them, and are thus separated into igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks. Igneous rocks are formed fr, special paving blocks, or tireA tire ( US spelling) or tyre ( UK spelling) is a roughly toroidal piece of (usually) rubber placed on a wheel to cushion it. Tires generally have reinforcing threads in them; based on the orientation of the threads, they are classified as bias-ply/ cross-tread woven mats. The intent of these is to allow precipitation falling on the surface to soak into the ground through the spaces inherent in the parking lot surface. The ground then may become contaminated in the surface of the parking lot, but this tends to stay in a small area of ground, which effectively filters water before it seeps away.