By Dennis Collin
I was recently asked about using Path of Travel lines on a site model. The idea was to be able to estimate how far it was for someone to place their refuse bin at a collection point. Unlike a fire evacuation plan, there were no building walls or doors to define the quickest, just elements modelled as site elements, toposolids and ordinary CAD linework.
Despite being intended for use within a building model, path of travel calculations can be performed on a plain, dumb, line based 2D CAD drawing file. With the introduction of way points and disabling obstacle categories in options, a route can be traced from a nominal start point to a given location.
Should there be a need to introduce a ‘vertex’ to allow for a safe road crossing, or a more credible route, a waypoint can be added by selecting the line and click to add a waypoint location.
The resultant line can be colour coded with visibility graphics or object styles for clarity and scheduled and tagged like any Revit family.
Unfortunately, at the time of writing (Sept 2023) there are no ways to supress or configure the waypoint vertices or arrow heads, but by thickening the line to a heavier line weight, it does suppress the visibility of the vertex corners to a degree. Hopefully this limitation will be addressed in a future version of Revit. This function could be used on any site model that is not wholly a building to provide an indication of a evacuation route and the time it would take to arrive at the muster point.