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StabiliGrid pervious grass parking lot in Tilles Park, St. Louis
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StabiliGrid pervious grass parking lot in Tilles Park, St. Louis
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See photo below: Although the grids will not be visible next spring, once the grass is seeded and flourishes, today you may see that StabiliGrid soil stabilizer geo-grids do not require any topcover (unlike the fracture-prone HDPE grid systems).
The reason: StabiliGrid is both durable + Flexible (from -58° to + 194° Fahrenheit).
Any vehicular traffic surface which is less flexible suffers greater damage as a result of heavy traffic (ref: the Truck
to support the brittle HDPE grids).
Although the HDPE geo-grids are less rigid than conventional paving (such as concrete), StabiliGrid is manufactured from a much more flexible + durable raw material, requiring much higher production standards than is required for "stamp, crank and repeat" fast-paced HDPE injection molding.
Also, because of the permeability + flexibility, StabiliGrid is insusceptible to the winter ground freeze/thaw cycles which devastate concrete and asphalt conventional paving. Their brittleness + impermeability requires excessive foundation work and roadbed construction, in order to shield the fragile frozen concrete or ashpalt from the winter ground surges and upheavals.
For more about the overriding importance that a roadway surface be flexible (not simply with a high resistance-to-pressure-at-the-surface or "compressive strength"), please download the Comprehensive Truck Size and Weight Study (TS&W) performed for the FHWA (Federal Highway Administration).
 Section 1.2 a of the Comprehensive Truck Size and Weight Study (TS&W) refers to the necessity to create a separate set of ESAL values (Equivalent Single-Axle Loads) for concrete and ashpalt roadways (although they are referred to as "rigid and flexible" in this document).
Because asphalt is relatively more flexible than concrete, heavy vehicles cause less traumatic/deconstructive damage to an "flexible" (ashpalt) roadway than the same truck would cause to a "rigid" (concrete) roadway.
The "separate sets of ESAL values" therein mentioned was an acknowledgement of this scientific fact: the more flexible the surface, the less damage resulting from traffic.
Of course, those studies (originally performed in the 1950's and last updated in 1986) do not address the relative flexibility of StabiliGrid versus either asphalt or concrete.
Therefore, those local municipalities' building codes and standards regulating local roadway/parking/driveway construction standards - which are based upon and rely solely upon the obsolete and outdated AASHTO H-20 or M-18 guidelines (deriving from research in the 1950s and 1980s) - are often misapplied and misunderstood. Those AASHTO guidelines are accurate and reliable ONLY for the mediums for which they were written: concrete, ashpalt, and other eco-toxic forms of conventional paving dating back to the 19th century and earlier.
As such, the AASHTO standards do not provide accurate or reliable guidelines for roadway construction using nonconventional, high-compressive-strength + highly-flexible, envirornmentally sound alternative paving systems such as StabiliGrid today.
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