Using the Design Criteria for Superelevation

Civil 3D 2009 has the ability to design superelevation in roadways based on criteria set in our alignments. We are going to take a look at these settings and also how they are applied.

The design criteria for any alignment are held in the alignment properties under the design criteria tab. This is where we will begin to assign specifics.

Above you can see the contents of the design criteria tab. This is where we will set up our design speed for the alignment based on stations as you can see above. This is also where we will specify our AASHTO criteria. For this road we are going to go with a 6 percent super. We are going to start at station 14+59.78 and work our way to the end of the alignment.

Once we set up our design criteria we can move onto the superelevation tab to actually compute our roadway data based on the design criteria.

We can then compute our data in this tab by choosing the Set Superelevation Properties button in the top left of the dialog box.

It will then compute the superelevation data by using the tangent and curve data and then display it in a dialog to ensure that it is correct. Once we confirm our data and select ok the superelevation tab is populated with our information for our roadway design as seen below.

Once this information is tied to the alignment we can create our roadway corridor and see the Superelevation take place.

Now we can use the view/edit corridor section to make sure that our settings have been applied as seen below.

Above you can see that the Superelevation has been applied.

Civil 3D is a great tool for designing roadways. As you can see above this is a very powerful and quick way to apply superelevation data to a roadway. One of the main advantages to using Civil 3D for this task is that all the dynamic aspects of modeling in Civil 3D still apply, letting us move through design changes quickly even with such complex data applied.

This page last edited on Thursday, June 03, 2010