Merge and Split Roads

Hello, this is John. And today, we're going to be taking a look at doing splits and mergers on a freeway in RoadRunner.

To get started, I'm going to go to my Road Styles folder and select the Freeway road style. I'm in the Road Plan tool. I'm going to zoom out a little bit and create a stretch of freeway from there to there by right-clicking and right-clicking to define a stretch of road, and then create another stretch of freeway. I'm doing this so that there's some room to do the split and the merge.

The example that I'm going to be creating is a single-road freeway splitting into two roads and then joining back into one road here for a bridge in the middle. So to do this, I'm going to switch over to the Slip Road tool, and I'm going to zoom in here and mouse over the end of this road towards the inner lane, and then right-click and drag to define the split. I'm going to do this for the other side. Now I've created two roads for each side of the carriageway.

To merge this back together, I'm going to left mouse and box pick this side, and then right-click and drag the inner side again and drag it over here to snap it together. I'm going to do the same for this side, right-click and drag, and snap together. You can see that a surface was automatically created because all of these are standard non-bridged roads.

To finish this off, I'm going to go into the Lane tool, select these shoulders here, remove them. And I'll add them myself by going to the Lane Add tool, going and selecting Border, and adding a border lane on each side. Now I'm going to simply go back to my Road Plan tool and adjust the shape of this a little bit to better match the shape of the bridge I'm interested in. Something like that.

Now I'm going to go over into the Road Construction tool, click on this road, this node roughly there, and set its type to Bridge. I'm going to do the same on this side and this side as well. If I go under here, you can see the bridges for that full extent.

If I then create another freeway that goes underneath this, for example, and bring its height profile down by clicking and dragging-- now I've created a relatively high freeway overpass. You can see the full extent of this bridge if I create a simple surface by choosing the Surface tool and then right-clicking to define a surface around-- you can see my merged split bridge.

If you want to take this further and continue splitting, you can always use the Slip Tool and use it as a regular off-ramp by right-clicking and dragging. Notice that some lanes may be dropped. You can also do this from the end of a road if you only want to pull off, say, these two lanes. I'll just go to that lane, right-click, and drag it. And if I only wanted to do these two, left-click and hold Shift to select those two, and right-click and drag to just pull off those.

That's how you do basic splits and merges in RoadRunner for a freeway. Thank you for watching.