AutoCAD Civil 3D

[#1]

Gotchya.  Yes, I like utilities as networks due to the Interference capabilities and Profile projection capabilities.

How many road crossings? I think it would be worth it to quickly edit those in through the Pipe Network editor for the productivity reasons above.

[#2]

Okay so here is what I think will work best for me here.........

I drew in a polyline along my utility.  In this case it some communications lines.  I used the grading function to get elevations from my existing surface model.  I then lowered that line 3' below the surface.  Next thing I did was use the "delete pi" commanding in grading to get rid of probably 2/3 of the pi's.  This left me with about 5-6 segments.  I then created a pipe network from that line and it gave me 5-6 pipes.  I drew those into the profile view and then just turned off all the pipes except the one that actually crosses my centerline.  Seems to be pretty close.

I thought about just doeing 5' either side of the centerline and calling it good but our new sewer is 15' off centerline and I want to see any potential conflicts down the way with utilities so I wanted to draw in the utilities that far out.

[#3]

the only time we need to show existing utilities is in the cross sections. so i do the polyline thing but i draw from the cross section sample line/utility line intersection. that gives pipe lengths of 50' (assuming your sample lines are 50'). i convert that polyline to a feature line with elevations only at the verticies. drop it the required depth and then convert to a pipe.  it creates null structures at each intersection which i erase. i have pipe styles set up for each utility. it works pretty well and doesn't use too many resources.