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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Great question. The alignment of a road is determined by a number of factors. If you consider cost as a primary factor, the reasons become more obvious.
A straight line, is the shortest path but not the most economical for the construction cost.
Let’s take a simple case a hill, you could make a line straight through it but it would require the excavation of the hill removing the material and getting rid of it. However the cost of going around would cost less to construction.
Roads are built in such a way as to minimize the amount of material that you must excavate and also fill in. This is called balancing cut and fill. You design the road’s vertical alignment cost is minimized by doing this.
The horizontal alignment cost is minimized by avoiding bodies of water, significant hills and so forth.
The actual process is done by taking all of the data about the horizontal and vertical topography (layout of the earth.) Then a series of alignments are computed until the alignment that minimizes cost while meeting other design criteria is selected.
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