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Over the past several decades, California bearing ratio (CBR) value has been used in many countries for empirical pavement designs and still many countries are using it for unbound granular materials strength measurement and as input to their pavement design chart. Furthermore, CBR value of unbound granular material is frequently correlated with its fundamental mechanical properties such as resilient modulus, which in turn is often used as an input to a mechanistic pavement design procedure. In the present study, the effect the aggregate packing has on the CBR values of unbound materials is investigated. A packing theory-based framework that allows to identify the load-carrying part of the aggregate skeleton is presented. Aggregate packing parameters controlling the CBR performance of the unbound materials are introduced and evaluated with the experimentally measured CBR values of 20 unbound granular materials found in the literature. It is shown that the CBR values of granular materials are to a great extent controlled by the packing characteristics of their load-carrying skeleton.

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