So I was out searching for treasure while eating Kraft Dinner one day when a thought occurred to me, “There must be an easier way of designing curb profiles for my corridor”.

**Note from Dana: Translation- Kraft Dinner is Canadian for Kraft Mac and Cheese.  They eat it more than we do, and it is usually the whole meal as opposed to a side dish.**

Your curb return and Edge of Travel Way profiles must exactly match where their respective baselines meet within your corridor.  It can be tough to synchronize them.  In the Autodesk AOTC Intersections manual and here in a very good article written by the famous Ms. Probert, the cool thing to do is create a Station/Offset label that references profile elevations.  Don’t get me wrong, this is a very good technique.  I use it even for this article.  I just have my own spin that I think makes it even easier.

I live in a place where there are many steep hills.  Sometimes the curb return profiles can be tricky especially when both intersecting roads are steep.  The issue I have with the labels method is that it’s hard to visualize the incoming and outgoing grades so I can design a curb profile that works AND drains well.

Enough preamble, here’s my idea:

Create your corridor for the main road and side road and make sure you create the top surface.  The red lines are my corridor region boundaries.  I’m not worried about the surface boundary at this point.

It’s time now to create my curb alignments, but instead of limiting them to the curve (magenta lines) extend them a little further (yellow lines) along the ETW (Edge of Travel Way).  This way we can sample our top surface when we create the curb profile views.

It’s really obvious here what our ETW is doing and we can design our profile accordingly.  And you can see exactly where the curve begins and ends if you turn on the Grid at Horizontal Geometry Points in the profile view style (blue vertical lines).

I’m not worried about the jagged green lines because they are based on the Top surface PRIOR to adding the curb baseline.

Once you’ve designed the curb profiles you can finish up the corridor normally.  Be careful when you’re adding the Curb Return baselines.  Because your alignments extend past the actual curves you need to make sure the start and end stations of the region are limited to ONLY the curve.

BONUS TIP:

Ok, so we’re happy with our corridor.  Many municipalities require your curb profiles drafted on paper with labels at the quarter points.  In order to see these quarter points in profile you need to have horizontal geometry points at these locations.  You must split the arc in your curb alignment into 4 equal segments.  4 fixed curves should do the trick (blue circles).

Edit your profile view style just right, add two profile view labels and an elevation band and you have your curb return profile ready for go time.

Happy designing,

Matt