Pringle Creek's green streets mentioned as model in OEC's spring newsletter

Oregon Environmental Council, the state’s oldest environmental organization, has an article in their most recent "One Oregon, One Environment" newsletter. The article, titled "Depaving Paradise," is on page seven and features the following photo and caption:

Pringle Creek Community in Salem has one of the largest installations of pervious asphalt in the country. The green streets are narrower than conventional streets, using less materials to build and calming traffic. They have no curbs, which reduces construction costs and allows vegetated swales to capture, absorb and clean stormwater runoff.

The article does a good job explaining water quality issues. Water quality and conservation are key aspects of the Pringle Creek Community plan, along with renewable energy, beautiful, durable and energy-efficient homes, community gardens and commitment to local foods, and having a diversity of ages, lifestyles and incomes for our residents while fostering a sense of community.

Go to the Oregon Environmental Council website and consider joining, donating, volunteering for this organization that is a major player in advocating policy in the Oregon Legislature. OEC's strategic plan is:

• Protect kids' health from toxic pollution


• Improve stewardship of Oregon's rivers


• Slow global warming


• Build a sustainable economy


• Create a sustainable food and farm system


• Strengthen support for effective environmental policy in the Oregon Legislature

On the roads again

Pringle Creek’s porous asphalt roads are all over the media these days--and for good reason. Take a look at this dramatic photograph showing the Pringle Creek entrance, where the beautiful porous pavement meets the flooded impervious city street.

Click here to see more such photos (thanks, santiago). Clearly, "pervious" is better. No wonder these streets are getting so much media coverage. The latest is Porous Streets Work--Even in Rainy Oregon on the worldchanging website. Columnist Erica Barnett expresses disappointment that supposedly "green" Seattle recently repaved a parking lot near Lake Washington with impervious asphalt:

What reminded me of that incident was a story in the Salem, Oregon Statesman Journal about a system of porous streets in that city's Pringle Creek Community, a housing development that has gotten national praise (even landing on Natural Home's list of the top 10 "green" housing developments in the US) for its green building and sustainable-design practices. Community members had worried that the system would not be able to stand up to Oregon's wet winters; so far, with February getting underway, residents have been hard-pressed to so much as find a puddle.

The two hyperlinks are in the original. The referenced Statesman Journal article is new, so take a look at that. And here is yet another, the website of Construction Equipment Guide. It is featuring Willamette Valley Tabbed for Porous Asphalt Streets, a very technically informative piece. Here's a sample:

The contractor washed and vacuumed the fines out of the pavement before laying the final lift of 2-in. (5 cm) pervious wearing course with a 3/8-in. (0.95 cm) top-size aggregate. The wearing course utilized a polymer modified PG 70-22 grade binder to reduce drain down and enhance long-term durability. The surface course was laid from May 25 to June 2. River Bend Sand and Gravel produced the porous asphalt mix.

“This was a unique and challenging project,” said Ron Boschler, president of North Santiam Paving. “We had done a lot of projects using open-graded design, but nothing where the water is supposed to drain through the entire street, like this porous pavement. The pavement held up well under the construction traffic. The paving part of the job was very similar to an ordinary paving job.”

"Green" asphalt

Pringle Creek and its amazing porous asphalt are the cover story of the Aphalt Pavement Association of Oregon’s magazine. Online the issue is a large (3MB) pdf: Forget Yellow Brick Roads, Think Green Asphalt Streets! Good title.

Pringle Creek developers are not among the skeptics. The community is the first of significant size to use 100% permeable pavement in its streets. And with 9,000 linear feet of streets and alleyways, it is believed to be the largest residential application of porous asphalt in the country.
“Sustainability is the real motivator for us,” said Don Myers, Pringle Creek project manager and president of Sustainable Development, Inc. in Salem. “People are drawn to it, and it supports our company’s philosophy of environmental stewardship,” he added.

The article has a full technical explanation of how the roads were built, how the pavement works. I prefer to think it’s magic. Watch our little 10-second video below and tell me it’s not magical.

Roads for people

This week North Santiam Paving has been installing the final lift of porous asphalt here. The picture below, from last week, shows them completing a cross street section of an alley-way in the area of the live-work lofts. Pretty interesting--by increasing the cross hatches of light colored concrete, which look a lot like sidewalks or crosswalks, the street is transformed from an automobile-dominated road to a pedestrian right-of-way surface, a walking or bicycling surface. Though cars and trucks get through just fine, it's as if the space is more for people.

--santiago

Civil engineers visit Pringle Creek

The Capital Branch local section of the American Society of Civil Engineers held a field trip and meeting at Pringle Creek Community on May 24.
A group of 30 engineers, led by President Ken Roley (who is with the City of Salem Public Works), celebrated their 10 year anniversary and presented a a lifetime achievement award to member Ken Archibald, who started his career in civil engineering in 1958. Congratulations, Mr. Archibald.

The meeting included an overview of Pringle Creek by Don Myers. That was followed by Chuck Gregory of W&H Pacific (which created the asphalt mix for Pringle Creek), who did a very interesting presentation on the entire porous street system from an engineer’s technical perspective--soil compaction, rock size, flow and absorption rates, and also the step by step process, innovations, and lessons learned.

So, why porous roadways? Pervious concrete and asphalt mimic the natural environment by capturing falling rain, filtering and absorbing it, and recharging the aquifer. This is important because not only does the City need ground water in the summer for human use, wildlife relies on a steady flow of groundwater that is slowly released into watersheds throughout the year, which keeps the streams cool, clean and at normal levels. Porous roadways (and rain gardens) act as giant, spread-out sand filters and phytoremediation (plants + pollution removal) centers for cleaning stormwater on the way to the aquifer. It slows things down and allows bacteria to break down or absorb pollutants.

Conventional impermeable road surfaces, on the other hand, collect non-point source pollution on the road surface--oil and coolant off our cars, heavy metals, like copper dust off brake pads, particulates that settle on the road surface, mercury, spilled gasoline from the mower, you name it--and, then after a storm event carries all that junk directly to our waterways in one big dose of poison. The rapidity of the drainage increases erosion and sediment turbidity. This is a bad deal for fish or wildlife, like crossing a toxic waste dump in a thick haze of smog. Or like swimming through a toilet. In 1999, Salem spilled 127 million gallons of sewage into the Willamette River, mostly after heavy rainfall overwhelmed the system. The Willamette is #3 on the 2006 Most Endangered American Rivers list, thanks mainly to toxic mixing zones, but not helped any by sewer overflows I’m sure.

Pringle Creek Community has the largest neighborhood porous street system in the country. Having engineers, developers, contractors and people who are involved with water quality come out to see our project will hopefully help start a sea change on how streets are made.

--santiago

Porous, pervious, permeable

There are 2.6 million miles of roads in the United States. Pringle Creek Community has 7000 feet--and uses pavement that is better for the environment. Porous, pervious, permeable, all three words mean that the pavement has holes that allow water to go through it.

Pringle Creek’s system of porous streets and alleys is said to be “the nation’s first full-scale porous pavement project.” Our main website features a lot of information about the system. The Statesman Journal has a video you can watch [no longer available], in which Don Myers explains the benefits of the system.

And Ped Shed, a blog by Laurence Aurbach, a leading architect of the new urbanism and advocate for walkable design, has a post with all that and more, including quotes from a paper by Patrick Condon, Pringle Creek’s Sustainability Principles, Visioning and Design Guidelines guy.

If you're wondering about "ped shed," it's like watershed . . . “Ped shed is short for pedestrian shed, the basic building block of walkable neighborhoods. A ped shed is the area encompassed by the walking distance from a town or neighborhood center. Ped sheds are often defined as the area covered by a 5-minute walk (about 0.25 miles, 1,320 feet, or 400 meters).”

Pictures: Pervious meets impervious

Photos taken late January 2008