Highways compliance checks

The ✅ Checks tool measures the road network you have drawn or generated and judges it against a chosen design standard — with the results drawn straight on the plan, and reported as numbered, lettered sheets in the exports.

The compliance overlay (📐)

Pick Checks ▸ Compliance overlay in the palette, or 📐 Vehicle Turning in the sidebar's 11 · Analysis & Simulation. Colour-coded feedback appears on the plan — green pass, amber check, red fail — and a panel lists every finding, numbered, each with its badge as the plan draws it.

Which badge is this row? Click a row and its badge is lifted above every other one, enlarged, numbered like the row and ringed in a pulsing magenta, while every other badge dims; if it was out of view, or partly hidden behind the panel, the tools or a bar along the bottom, the plan pans just far enough to bring all of it into the clear — a badge already in full view never moves the plan. Click the row again, press Esc, close the panel or click empty ground to let go. Esc lets go of the picked row first and the filter with the next press, and nothing else: a swept route, a measurement or an object waiting to be placed stays until the press after. The 3D view draws no badges: a picked row says so while you are in 3D, and picking a row from 3D takes you back to the plan to ring its badge. Zoom to it on the picked row zooms in close, as a row click used to. With a mouse, resting on a row previews the same; an arrow on the edge of the clear part of the plan points to a badge that is out of view or hidden. In a sketch view a finding that lies off the sheet is marked off this sheet in its row, and picking it leaves your sheet where it is.

What does this badge say? With the panel open, click a badge on the plan and the panel lists just the findings at that spot — every check that measured it there, including the passes — under a bar reading Showing 2 findings for …. Click the badge again, another badge, Show all, Esc or empty ground to change or clear it; a finding you picked from the filtered list keeps its row after Show all, passes included, so you can let it go there. With the panel closed a click on a badge goes through to whatever is beneath, as always. The selected object's own nodes and handles still come first: a badge on a bend or turning head sits on the very node you drag to fix it, so a drag there reshapes the road (Alt-click still deletes the node) and a plain click there filters as well. Neither is saved with the design or added to undo, and both work in a read-only view.

• Bend radii — every bend gets a badge with its measured centreline radius. Sharp 45–120° turns at kerb-return scale are judged as corners on their inner kerb radius; flowing curves are judged against the standard's bend minimum. A hard elbow with no radius is flagged with the largest fillet that would fix it.
• Visibility splays — the X × Y sight triangle at every junction, its Y edge following the kerb through curves. Houses, buildings, hedges, fences and street furniture inside a splay are flagged and outlined; shrubs and parking bays get an amber "keep it low / cars park here" note. A splay that leaves the site boundary is called out — that visibility relies on someone else's land.
• Turning spaces — dead ends longer than the standard's limit must have a turning space; hammerhead arms and turning-circle radii are measured against the design vehicle.
• Straight runs — road length before a bend or junction, against the standard's speed-control maximum.
• Junction spacing — centreline distance between adjacent junctions.
• Widths & shared drives — carriageway and shared-drive widths, and shared-drive length limits.

Choosing the standard

The Standard selector defaults to the site's preset (Durham-style / Manual for Streets / Compact). Pick Custom to edit every rule value — splay X and Y distances, bend and kerb minima, junction spacing, turning dimensions — and your figures are remembered on this device. Untick any check you don't want drawn. The standard you check against can deliberately differ from the preset you designed with.

In the exports

The planning report keeps the masterplan and sketch drawings clean — the analysis gets its own sheets. The report adds a Highways Compliance section: a key plan (the B&W sketch with only the checks drawn on it, every finding numbered, the problem areas boxed as lettered windows A, B, C…), a matching table (failed · warning · passed, each row keyed #7 · B), then close-up detail sheets — one framed view per area at readable scale, six to a page. The sheets are included whether or not the overlay is showing on screen.

DXF — Export DXF opens a dialogue; tick Include compliance views and the drawing gains the checks on their own CHK_* layers (fail red, warning yellow, pass green), the lettered area windows, and a 2× scaled detail view of each area in a grid beside the site plan, each framed and titled — the standard CAD detail convention, ready for markup.