Belleville's road infrastructure has expanded steadily since the Loyalist settlement era, but the real engineering challenge lies beneath the asphalt. The city rests on a complex mix of glacial till, silty clay, and occasional limestone bedrock near the Moira River, with a population of over 50,000 driving daily on pavements that must withstand harsh freeze-thaw cycles. When the City upgraded Bell Boulevard a few years back, the pavement design relied heavily on [laboratory CBR testing](#) to assess the bearing capacity of the native silty subgrade. Without a reliable California Bearing Ratio value, even a well-compacted granular base can fail prematurely under Ontario's seasonal extremes. Our team has run hundreds of CBR tests on samples pulled from Belleville's east-end industrial parks and the residential subdivisions near Loyalist College, and the results consistently show that the local glacial till — when properly compacted — delivers CBR values in the 8 to 15 percent range. Complementing the CBR with a Proctor compaction curve is standard practice, since the moisture-density relationship directly governs the soaked strength reading you get in the lab.
A soaked CBR value below 3 percent on Belleville's silty clays can double the required granular base thickness compared to a subgrade with CBR above 10 percent.
