Explaining Superelevation to your Grandma

A few weeks ago, there were some funny twitter remarks from James Wedding. He was attending AEC Media Day in Waltham and said:

Well, I can do you one better. We dug deep into the archives and found this rare clip of the actual moment:

There are quite a few new features around superelevation for Civil 3D 2011. For technical details on exactly what is new, read the section in the Civil 3D 2011 Users’ Guide about superelevation. You can find it under Help or you can find it here in the online documentation.

For Blogger Day, I made a drawing to show the superelevation wizard and superelevation views. It begins with an alignment that does not have superelevation applied, a few cross section views and a corridor.

When the superelevation is applied, the cross section views change.

I recorded a casual little video (a bit of an experiment) where I show how this drawing works. Next time you are at a family picnic and your Grandma asks “What is superelevation? Aren’t all roads flat?” you can either pick up a file folder or whip out Civil 3D 2011. The choice is yours!