About Streets and Sidewalks

Use Site Designer to create streets and sidewalks in a site design.

Most streets and sidewalks are created using the Relative to Toposurface option, rather than Constant Elevation. When you create streets and sidewalks, Site Designer updates the toposurface with the slope of the street or sidewalk tied into the proposed toposurface. It also creates and places the new streets and sidewalks in the model so you can visualize them.

Special Site Designer families for streets allow you to control the number of lanes, cross-slopes, curb and gutter placement, boulevard clearing zones, materials, and slope projection settings. Sidewalk families allow you to control the sidewalk width, depth, material, and slope projection settings.

Use the Site Designer Report tool to obtain base and sub-base materials quantities. Use Revit schedules to obtain quantities for pavement, curbs, and gutters, as well as the total cut and fill.

Intersections

When sketching host lines for intersecting streets or sidewalks, make sure that the lines connect at the point where the center lines will intersect. This practice ensures that Site Designer correctly detects intersections.

When you place the first street, Site Designer adds gutters and curbs along the entire street, as defined by its family. When you add a street that intersects with the first, Site Designer detects the intersection and asks you to specify the radius of the connection. It then adjusts the toposurface, curbs, and gutters as appropriate for both streets.

This process may take some time to complete, because the software must adjust the toposurface and regenerate the original street and the new street.

Note: If you make instance-based changes to the original street or sidewalk, such as defining its material, those changes are lost when the software regenerates the element to create the intersection. To avoid this issue, modify the Site Designer family with desired changes instead of modifying the instance. To modify a Site Designer family, use the Site Designer Family Manager.

Sidewalks for streets

While street families can include associated gutters and curbs that follow the street, they do not include sidewalks. Add sidewalks separately using the Locate Sidewalk tool.

If you want a sidewalk to follow a street, use the "Create A Copy" option when creating the street. This option retains the host line for the street, making it available for reference in the model. When creating the host line for a sidewalk, you can reference the street host line, applying an offset to it.

For example, the following image shows

• the host line of the street
• the host line of the sidewalk, which was offset from the street host line
• a host line for another sidewalk, which has not yet been placed