Simple Negative Stationing Convention Question

[camden.n.dean]

Hi all,

This question may not be suited for this forum (mods, please remove it if you feel so inclined).

I am just trying to determine conventions related to negative stationing.

Say I have an alignment running West to East, and I am at Sta. 0+00. If I go 50 feet east (up station), I am at Sta 0+50. Conversely, if I go 50 feet west (down station), what station am I at?

My intuition is to call that Sta. 0-50, but my CAD template wants to call that Sta. -0+50. Is there a standard convention?

For context, I am a coastal engineer in the USA. We typically avoid negative stationing, so this has been a friendly debate in the office about which way is "right."

Here is another to consider: say I am 190 ft up station from Sta. 0+00. This is unambiguously Sta. 1+90. Is it also valid to call that location Sta. 2-10?

Thanks for any input!

-Camden

[jroot · Accepted solution]

I have never seen stationing expressed as something like 0-50. It would be -0+50. Ideally though, the alignment would begin before all the possible things that need to be identified so that negative stationing never happens.

[camden.n.dean]

Thanks for the input!

Concur about avoiding negative stationing. We typically avoid it, but we are working with an existing structure (jetty) and want to maintain the existing stationing. We need the negative stationing since we are expanding the structure further west of Sta. 0+00.