Recently, One of our customers called looking for Ideate technical support on a project where the planar roadway was sloping towards a detention basin. The issue was that the superelevation tool kept giving them the wrong cross slope for areas outside the curve. Good news: all they needed to do was change one setting.
Superelevating a crowned roadway in Civil 3D is common, and you may have used this option in the past. But if you have never superelevated a planar roadway in Civil 3D, there is one trick you'll need to know to make it work.
Keep reading.
As per the figures below, we have an alignment with direction left to right, superelevation diagram and the typical section.
In this simple assembly, with just two lanes, the important thing to note is that the high side is right ETW.
The trick is to specify the high side in the Calculate Superelevation dialog box > Roadway Type tab > High Side Location drop down. (Refer to the figure below.)
The reason this becomes so important, is if you do not tell Civil 3D where the high side is, Civil 3D will not assign the right lane slope in areas where there is no superelevation. All in all, it works as it is supposed to only when you specify the high side, but if you miss this setting you very well could see problems.
And that’s all you need to know about superelevating planar roadway.
Get more tips and tricks here.
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Gaurav Bagga
Senior Application Specialist Infrastructure
Gaurav is a Senior Application Specialist for Infrastructure Solutions at Ideate based out of San Francisco. He has over 18 years of experience in construction and related software industry. With this extensive design technology background he helps engineering and surveying companies, federal and state government agencies, and ENR 500 firms critically analyze and improve their construction drawing production process. He implements Civil infrastructure design technology led by InfraWorks and Civil 3D and has helped Ideate grow Civil Infrastructure Services. Being an industry recognized speaker he has presented cutting edge design technology at several industry conferences such as Autodesk University. Find Gaurav on Twitter.