Welcome to the Introduction to Road Design website. This website gives you information on the key features that influence road design. Road design is basically a 3D problem broken down into two seperate 2D problems;
1. Horizontal Alignment - a plan view of the road.
2. Vertical Alignment - a longitudinal section through the centreline of the road called a profile view.
To design roads it is necessary to connect straight horizontal and vertical sections of road using curves of constant or varying radius. These curves deflect vehicles travelling along one of the straights to enable it to continue its journey along the other straight. Horizontal curves are used to deal with changes of direction in plan, and vertical curves are used to deal with changes of gradient. The simplest form of road curve used in the horizontal alignment of a road is a circular curve. The radius of this curve is dependant on the design speed of the traffic.
Watch the video below to get some insight into what we mean by horizontal and vertical alignment.
1. Horizontal Alignment - a plan view of the road.
2. Vertical Alignment - a longitudinal section through the centreline of the road called a profile view.
To design roads it is necessary to connect straight horizontal and vertical sections of road using curves of constant or varying radius. These curves deflect vehicles travelling along one of the straights to enable it to continue its journey along the other straight. Horizontal curves are used to deal with changes of direction in plan, and vertical curves are used to deal with changes of gradient. The simplest form of road curve used in the horizontal alignment of a road is a circular curve. The radius of this curve is dependant on the design speed of the traffic.
Watch the video below to get some insight into what we mean by horizontal and vertical alignment.
Website Design Process
The initial process involved carrying out some investigation into html on the w3chools site. The site is fantastic and html seems very easy to use. It seemed possible to write the whole website in html, but my first crude attempts viewed with a browser revealed very amateur formatting. In addition I also experienced difficulties adding images using html. While the addition of jpeg images which already had a url was reasonably straightforward I could not upload images from my own computer. This presented a problem as it was necessary for me to draw some images for the site myself and they would not have urls. For these reasons I decided to use Weebly for my first website attempt. I did however include one table in the Vertical Alignment section of the site which was generated using embedded html. The experience has made me very curious about html and I am confident that I will use it again because I was surprised how easy it was and I was fascinated to learn that you could view the source code for any website.
The images I drew myself were autocad drawings. These needed to be converted to jpeg files in order to upload them to Weebly. Initially I converted them first to pdf and then checked on google how to convert them to jpeg. This necessitated using google docs. By creating a drawing in google docs you can save a copied pdf as a jpeg. Unfortuantely the line weights for the autocad drawings did not show up to the required thickness on the jpeg files and given more time I would have attempted to improve this.
The Weebly site was incredibly easy to use and had very good support and instruction on the site. All in all I enjoyed the process and will be doing it again.
The initial process involved carrying out some investigation into html on the w3chools site. The site is fantastic and html seems very easy to use. It seemed possible to write the whole website in html, but my first crude attempts viewed with a browser revealed very amateur formatting. In addition I also experienced difficulties adding images using html. While the addition of jpeg images which already had a url was reasonably straightforward I could not upload images from my own computer. This presented a problem as it was necessary for me to draw some images for the site myself and they would not have urls. For these reasons I decided to use Weebly for my first website attempt. I did however include one table in the Vertical Alignment section of the site which was generated using embedded html. The experience has made me very curious about html and I am confident that I will use it again because I was surprised how easy it was and I was fascinated to learn that you could view the source code for any website.
The images I drew myself were autocad drawings. These needed to be converted to jpeg files in order to upload them to Weebly. Initially I converted them first to pdf and then checked on google how to convert them to jpeg. This necessitated using google docs. By creating a drawing in google docs you can save a copied pdf as a jpeg. Unfortuantely the line weights for the autocad drawings did not show up to the required thickness on the jpeg files and given more time I would have attempted to improve this.
The Weebly site was incredibly easy to use and had very good support and instruction on the site. All in all I enjoyed the process and will be doing it again.