Sufficient pavement skid resistance is one of the essential factors to ensure traffic safety. The real contact area (Ar) between the tire and road is significant for understanding and improving the skid resistance performance. In this study, the tire–road contact area is measured by squeezing a smooth underside-dyed rubber block into the specimens, using a self-designed fixture mounted on the universal test machine. The three-dimensional (3D) printing technology is used to separate the specimens with multi-scale roughness. Surface texture on 29 AC pavements is obtained by a 3D scanner and qualified by the root-mean-square surface height (Sq), to investigate the impact of pavement texture on the Ar. The skid resistance on 23 AC road sections is measured using the T2GO system, and the pavement texture is recorded, to discuss the influence of the Ar on the skid resistance. The results indicate that the multi-scale roughness rarely affects the measured contact area once the concerned wavelength is less than 0.6 mm. The Ar decreases with the Sq following a power function but has weak correlation with the friction coefficient. This study could provide an in-depth understanding of the tire–road contact and lays a foundation for optimizing the contact-related pavement performance.

The depth to which the pavement texture is enveloped by the tire tread rubber (d) is an important parameter related to contact performance. This study presents a new method (S-BAC), which relies on the ratio between the real contact area and the nominal tire-pavement contact area (S) and the bearing area curve (BAC), to measure the depth on pavements. The tire-pavement contact was simulated by contact between a non-patterned rubber block and pavement specimens. After analyzing the affecting factors, the new method was compared with previous methods by the d values and the application on the relationship between pavement texture parameters and friction. The results reveal that though there is a linear regression between the d obtained with the S-BAC and previous methods, the d values obtained with different methods differ. Applying the S-BAC method can strengthen the relationship between texture parameters and friction more than other methods.