Designing estate roads to Manual for Streets

Manual for Streets (MfS) reshaped how residential streets are designed in England and Wales, moving away from wide, fast highway geometry towards streets that work as places. This guide covers the essentials and how Airship Site Designer bakes them into every generated layout.

What Manual for Streets changed

MfS encourages lower vehicle speeds through design rather than signage, narrower carriageways where appropriate, and street layouts that prioritise pedestrians and place-making. Key ideas include:

• Carriageway widths matched to use — often narrower than older highway standards allow.
• Forgiving geometry and shorter forward visibility to keep speeds down.
• Junction spacing and turning heads sized for the vehicles that actually use the street, including refuse vehicles.
• Overrun and shared surfaces used deliberately rather than avoided.

How Airship applies it

Airship Site Designer generates adoptable-style road networks with sensible defaults you can switch between — including Manual for Streets and Durham County Council presets — covering carriageway width, kerb radii, entry throat and turning-head geometry. Roads curve on real radii through junctions, and cul-de-sacs get turning heads automatically. You can then adjust any road by hand with spline curve handles.

Beyond the roads

Once the network is right, houses front onto it, driveways run to the back of the footway, and parking fits to your ratio. Review the whole scheme in 3D and export a layered DXF for your highways engineer. See the full workflow in the housing estate layout software guide.

Presets are a starting point for feasibility and early design — always confirm the final geometry with the adopting highway authority and the current edition of Manual for Streets.