In my opinion, the dutch are world leaders in road technology. Some of the newly refirbished motorways, eg E30 are super quiet, and if you pop the clutch, you roll for what seems like miles.

The arguement Ive heard a local highway engineer uses is the UK climate requires stone laden surfaces for when its icy, but holland does experience colder winters

Imo its down to uk engineer mentality, stick with old proven and out of date techniques.

Interesting question.

www.ajer.org/papers/v3(7)/R037141148.pdf

P4 of this might shed some light. I was surprised to see asphalt and concrete virtually the same (true 'tarmac' is apparently obsolete now). There is a particularly noisy stretch of concrete on the new 4 lane M25 east of the M1 which is absolutely dreadful - the contractor's CEO should be made to sleep for a few days within 100yds of it.

The link doesn't seem to work: however, from my "Motor truck engineering handbook" i can list the following figure for rolling resistance of various surfaces - these are in pounds force per 1000Lb of vehicle weight.

Good concrete 15, good asphalt 12, good macadam 15, cobbles 55, 2" snow 25, 4"snow 37,level sand 60 to 150.

Poorer quality surfaces quoted as plus 5lb over the 'good' above.

Driving in Germany (VW Golf), I noticed the urban and suburban roads were much quieter smoother, almost polished, but they also felt less grippy. An engineer for a County Council with a lot of Mways here mentioned that they aim for a level of grip, requiring a certain rugosity/surface roughness, in the road topping. Apparently they had a piece of kit which would measure whether the surface was worn.

Rain appears to make the biggest difference in my experience. Pushing through all that standing water takes a lot of energy. Maybe the courser surfaces are better because the tyres are riding above the water on the "peaks" as it were.