sewage drain cover with cracked pavement

Post-Care Strategies to Maximize Parking Lot ROI

You’ve made the investment to maintain your asphalt parking lot. Now what? The following post-care tips can help you maximize the dollars invested and extend the safe usability of your pavement asset.

Post-Repair Care

Immediately after maintenance, the repair will need a little time to cure before it is safe to re-open the parking lot or section of the parking lot to traffic. Timing varies based on service; but in general, asphalt repairs require 24 hours; concrete requires 2-5 days; crack sealing requires 24-48 hours, sealcoating requires 24 hours; and striping requires 30 minutes. To help facilitate this, your contractor should erect well-marked barricades, cones, caution tape, and signage around the repair area.

Between Services Care

In between services, there are four things of which to be mindful:

  1. Drainage. Since water is the number-one enemy of a parking lot, it’s important to keep it off the parking lot as much as possible. And that requires a functioning drainage system. If catch basins are clogged, water can easily pond in low-lying areas, permeate through hairline cracks in the surface, and compromise the base. Easiest solution? Keep drains clear of debris and be sure that other features of your drainage system are performing effectively.
  1. Landscaping. Well-groomed greenspace is more than pleasing to the eye, it also prevents shrubbery from encroaching on pavement surfaces. Mulch and dirt, for example, are incompressible materials that can become lodged in cracks and cause widening. Leaves can clog catch basins or accumulate and cause unsightly staining. Large trees may grow roots outward and push through asphalt over time. If you have any bigger trees, consider relocating them away from the parking lot.
  1. Stains and Debris. The obvious culprits are fuel, oil, transmission fluid, or antifreeze. But even accumulated debris or garbage can stain surfaces over time. Pressure washing, on a light setting, every other month can help keep the parking lot clean and prevent costly damage to the asphalt.
  1. Hazards. Walk your parking lot each month or, if you’re remote, use our visual verification technology to check for hazardous conditions that may have popped up such as large cracks, potholes, uneven transitions, and fallen or missing signage. Identifying issues and responding rapidly is the key to saving money long-term.

There’s no doubt that routine parking lot maintenance and post-care strategies yield significant benefits and cost savings over time. If you would like to learn more, download our latest white paper and use our life-cycle cost calculator to estimate the savings using actual data from your company.