Why do most roads have a lot of bends? What is the process a civil engineer takes in planning out roads depending on their terrain? Is it hard to make more straight roads in canyon/mountain areas and why?
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When you design a road, you are trying to minimize the amount of earth that you have to move, because that’s the cheapest way to build the road.
A road has a design speed, and that design speed dictates how comfortable the driver will be. The radius of curves, and how much room you need when you transition from an uphill section to a downhill section, are both governed by the speed. Drivers can tolerate much tighter curves when driving slowly, because there’s less lateral G-force.
So at a first cut, you plan your road in the straightest line from Point A to Point B. If that’s going to require blasting the top off of one hill, and filling in a deep valley somewhere else, you’re probably going to modify the route so that it more closely follows the existing terrain.
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