corridors & parking lots

[rwatson654]

can someone suggest training material to model parking lots utilizing corridors?  I assume from the some of the post I've read that this is the best way to design parking lots using civil 3d.  I would most appreciate free training material, such as online.  due to the economy my company will not invest in training.

Civil 3D, 2009 & 2011

Win 7 Enterprise 64bit

8 GB

[Anonymous]

Unless the parking lot is a long narrow one, I don't like to use corridors (for parking lots) at all.  Most lots I deal with are odd shapes and several planters involved, which is not the best use of a corridor.

I design parking lots using surfaces and define them with feature lines for curbing and 3d polylines for surface breaklines in the asphault.  I start with an overall grade that is close to what I need for the majority of the lot, and then add feature lines at ac finsh grade to define islands and edges.  I then step offset those to define curbs.  If I need breaks in the ac surface, I add them now (say for a swale, or to define the limits of HC spaces).  If I need an occasional point (like a catch basin) they can be added now (or you can make a square feature line that represents the limits of the box).

Its very fast, and makes editing and tweaking very easy.  I usually try to name my feature lines so when I need to edit, I can zoom to them quickly.

Reid

[Anonymous]

Is your office on subscrition?  If you are, you can log into Autodesk University and access their traing videos.  Quite a bit of good stuff there.  Make sure you do all the tutorials with the program, and James Wedding's book is always a good reference to have on hand.

Reid

[rwatson654]

that has been my approach, a carryover from my LDT days. Thx for the information and reply

[rwatson654]

i will look into the videos from AU.  i have the Mastering AutoCAD Civil 3D 2008 and think it is a great resource. Thx for the heads-up on the video training.

[Jeff_M]

If you have access to AU (subscription member or attended AU in the past), here's a class that should help:

http://au.autodesk.com/?nd=class&session_id=2661

[rwatson654]

cool, thx for the link that will save me time hunting for it

[Neilw_05]

Having delved into the corridor approach myself I can share some of the pros and cons I encountered as it may save you from investing too much time into it if you forsee some of the issues in your project.

First off, one of the general workflows for the corridor approach is to create alignments for the edge of pavement and curb lines for the parking lot. These are then used to create corridors and curb/sidewalk assembllies applied to them to model the parking lot. The profiles for these alignments can be layed out manually or you can create a dynamic profile by creating a drape surface from a drivelane centerline and gradings and sampling it in the curb alignments. Edits to the drivelane profiles will update the drape surface which in turn updates the sampled profiles for the curb alignment. The curb corridors are thus dynamic to the drivelelane  centerlines.

While this technique works nicely in many situations, it does have some issues, particularly where curbs have mitered corners, since corridors don't handle sharp bends in alignments well. One solution is to put a very small radius in the curb lines at mitered corners, but that radius will become more pronounced as the assembly grows outward from the edge of the pavement alignment, such as at the back of curb or sidewalk. Another problem with the corridor approach is it is not as flexiible for subtle grading requirements such as when grading handicap parking stalls and warping pavement for drainage and slope constraints. In those scenarios featurelines have an advantage since you can apply relative elevations to them across a drive lane for example, verses having to calculate a profile PI for the corridor. Still the technique can be usefull when mixed with a combination of corridors and gradings/featurelines. I have been able to completely regrade parking lots by adjusting the profiles of drivelanes using this technique, something that can't be done with featurelines alone.

Neil

[rwatson654]

Neil, thx for the information. this will be helpful as I explore the use of corridors within our project.

[ryan.hawken]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Unless the parking lot is a long narrow one, I don't like to use corridors (for parking lots) at all.  Most lots I deal with are odd shapes and several planters involved, which is not the best use of a corridor.

I design parking lots using surfaces and define them with feature lines for curbing and 3d polylines for surface breaklines in the asphault.  I start with an overall grade that is close to what I need for the majority of the lot, and then add feature lines at ac finsh grade to define islands and edges.  I then step offset those to define curbs.  If I need breaks in the ac surface, I add them now (say for a swale, or to define the limits of HC spaces).  If I need an occasional point (like a catch basin) they can be added now (or you can make a square feature line that represents the limits of the box).

Its very fast, and makes editing and tweaking very easy.  I usually try to name my feature lines so when I need to edit, I can zoom to them quickly.

Reid

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This is how I have been designing carparks but the one problem I have in simply using feature lines is getting kerb setout tables out of the feature lines. Do you know of any way to easily extract coordinate data from featurelines?

If they were in a corridor you could use reports but the only way I can seem to get point data out of stand alone feature lines is to convert to a 3d polyline and then automatically create points at each IP and then using the points to make a  table. Doing it this way is repetitive and time consuming.

Ryan

[Matt.Anderson]

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