San Antonio spent part of the summer of 2023 testing a simple idea: could changing the surface of a road make it less brutally hot? The city applied 3 different pavement treatments at selected locations and brought in researchers from the University of Texas at San Antonio to measure what happened. The study covered 6 sites, with treated pavement compared with nearby untreated surfaces during several rounds of measurements in June and July. Researchers found that 1 product, SolarPave by SealMaster, consistently produced the strongest surface cooling. In afternoon measurements, the treated pavement was about 3.6°F cooler on average than the untreated comparison surface. That sounds promising, particularly in a city where summer pavement can become intensely hot, but there was an important catch: the cooling at road level did not translate into an equally clear drop in the temperature of the surrounding air. The experiment showed both where cool pavement can help and where its limits begin.
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