My buddy Todd over at LRHA pinged me today asking about restarting tag numbers for siteless alignments… and it got me thinking about something…
Civil 3D 2008 introduced the idea of a siteless alignment. For those out there who have struggled with the idea of site geometry, this is a nice improvement. Alignments built on the <none> site will not interact with feature lines or parcels or other alignments.
Alignments can still be placed on sites, however, and here are a few reasons why you might consider putting a few alignments on regular sites along with your parcels.
Read on….
The ROW command only works when your alignments are on the same site as your parcels.
Not my favorite tool, but it does have its place. You cannot use the the ROW tool with siteless alignments.
If you need tag numbers to start over again for different types of alignments in the same drawing.
You only get one set of alignment line/curve/spiral tags for all siteless alignments. If you needed your tags to start over again from 1 for a different batch of alignments in the same drawing, you’d need to create a regular site for them.
If you would like your alignments to act as site geometry.
There are definitely times where I like my alignments to act as parcel segments and slice up a boundary parcel. In this case, the desired alignments need to be placed on the same site as this boundary parcel.
There are also some cases where I would universally place alignments on the <none> site. These include:
- Alignments that follow pipe centerlines or offsite profiles.
- Transition alignments for corridor models, such as intersections and cul de sacs.
- Alignments used for things like river centerlines or parking lot corridors.
- Looping alignments where it is undesirable to have a parcel form inside the “loop”
- When in doubt, place it on the <none> site.
