Retention ponds have been dug along some of the motorways in France to minimize environmental pollution by preventing pollutants from spreading over the surrounding area. A series of studies have been conducted to determine the physicochemical characteristics of the particles settling down in such a pond to evaluate the effectiveness of the pond as a trap for heavy metals such as Pb, Zn and Cd. The highly contaminated roadside soil and the uncontaminated background soil were also studied for comparison. The settling particles exhibited heavy metal concentrations of 2 to 8 times as much as the background Sologne soil, depending on the metal species. However, the heavy metal concentrations in the roadside soil were 7 to 26 times higher than those in the· settling particles. Sequential extraction experiments illustrated that the highly contaminated roadside soil consisted mainly of the readily soluble fractions (FII, FIII and FIV) for all three heavy metals, but little W which is hardly soluble. The proportion of W considerably increased up to one third of the total in the settling particles for Pb and Zn. This result as well as the large concentration differences between the roadside soil and the settling particles indicates that most of the heavy metals were lost to the surroundings even before reaching the retention pond. Cd exhibited somewhat different behavior in that the most soluble FI, which is negligible for Pb and Zn, occupied as much as one fourth of the total in the roadside soil. In addition, FV for Cd did not increase in the settling particles.