Parking Lot and Entrance Pavers for Commercial Property

Asphalt is the right surface for most of a parking field. It is fast to install and it is the cheapest way to cover a large area. What asphalt does badly is hold up at the points where vehicles turn, stop, stand and drip, and it does nothing at all for how the property looks from the road.

We use pavers at the entrance apron where traffic slows and turns, in crosswalks running from the lot to the door, in the islands and medians that break up the field, and in the drop-off or loading zone where vehicles sit still. Concrete pavers carry load without rutting the way asphalt does under a standing vehicle in August, and a paver crosswalk reads as a crosswalk from a distance without depending on paint that needs redoing every other season.

Standing water in a parking lot becomes ice, and ice in a lot is a liability before it is an inconvenience. We pitch paved areas to move water to the existing catch basins, keep the runoff away from building entrances rather than across them, and set finished grades so the transition between asphalt and paver stays flush instead of developing a lip.

A permeable paver section is worth considering where a property is tight on stormwater capacity or where the town has runoff requirements on a site change. Permeable pavers let water pass through the surface into an open graded base rather than running to a basin. It is not right for every lot, it costs more up front and it needs periodic maintenance to stay permeable, but on the right site it solves a drainage problem and an appearance problem with one build.