Optimizing the Surface Texture of Cement Concrete Roads

The growing concern about the influence of the road surface on traffic noise raises the problem of reducing the noisiness of cement concrete roads whilst keeping high skid resistance values. Studies on various aspects of tyre/road interaction con-ducted in the past ten years at the Belgian Road ResearchCentre provide basic rules for designing and building optimizedcement concrete surfaces. The key concept consists of prevent-ing the adverse effects of "rnegatexture".