Roads, paths & driveways

You can draw your own roads and paths, and reshape any road — generated or drawn — with curve handles.

Road (🛣)

Click the Road tool and click along the route to draw a carriageway. It takes the carriageway and footway widths from your site rules.

Path (🚶)

The Path tool draws a pedestrian footpath — narrower, no carriageway — for links and green-space routes.

Drive (🚗)

Both driveway tools sit under 🚗 Driveways in the tools palette.

The Drive tool draws a driveway that snaps to the back of the nearest footway, connecting a plot to the street.

Shared drive (🛤)

The Shared drive tool draws a road with no pavement — just the running surface, flush with the frontages, 3.5 m wide by default. Houses front onto it and driveways and footpaths run onto it exactly as they do a street.

Where a shared drive meets an existing road it is cut back to the rear of that road's pavement, so the footway carries on past unbroken. Draw the end short of the road and it is extended to meet it; draw it over the road and it is trimmed back.

Select a shared drive with the Edit tool to change its own width in the bar at the bottom of the canvas — the site rule only sets the width a new one is drawn at. Shared drives are reported separately from adopted carriageway in the site stats and the appraisal.

Shared drives and the checks

A shared drive stops at the back of the street's pavement because that is what it is — a flush surface crossing the footway on a dropped kerb, not a kerbed junction. That is right for the drawing, and the compliance checker treats it accordingly: no junction geometry is applied at its mouth.

The design review nevertheless routes over it. Each shared-drive end that lands inside a street's corridor is joined to that street by a short crossover, charged at its real length, so the homes on a shared drive are part of the network like any others. Without it every shared drive would be an island whose homes could walk nowhere, and its mouth would be reported as a second dead end needing a reversing manoeuvre.

How paths and drives meet a road

Draw a footpath or a driveway towards a road and it finishes on the back of the pavement rather than stopping short in the grass — drawn a few metres short and aimed at the road, it is run out to meet it; drawn across the road, it is cut back. A path laid along the back of a pavement is left alone, because it is not trying to join it.

A driveway meeting a shared drive is the opposite case: same block paving, no kerb between them, so the two are drawn as one surface with the shared drive's edge opening across the drive rather than a joint line being drawn over it.

Curving a road

Select a road with the Edit tool and drag its spline handles to bend it on a smooth curve. This replaces the old "curve" button — every road is curveable directly.