Warm welcome to this post,

Today’s topic is one of the most interesting aspects that must be treated when targeting a traffic signalling design software solution: the traffic signs and road markings national standards.

There have been some attempts to get an agreement among different groups of countries in order to make follow a common standard. One of the most important attempts in Europe took place at the Convention on Road Signs and Signals of 1968 in Vienna, which was a crucial step to uniform the shapes of the traffic signs among the European countries.

Figure i: Vienna Convention official document cover page

Although the Vienna Convention was an important milestone for gathering common specifications for traffic signs and road markings among countries, nowadays each country follows its own national legislation. Countries may share some traffic signs aspects – most of them the ones referred on the Vienna Convention, but they do not share a common traffic signalling legislation.

DIFFERENT COUNTRY, DIFFERENT TRAFFIC SIGNS AND ROAD MARKINGS

Thus, from a practical and engineering point of view, besides the similarities between traffic signs from different countries, all of them are defined and specified in different legislations. One country, one legislation.

AUTOSIGN. ONE PRODUCT, MULTIPLE LEGISLATIONS

At CGS Labs, we are very aware of the situation and of how important is for user from different countries to have available the traffic signs and road markings based on their national standards.

That’s the reason why Autosign includes an innovative option that enables users to have access to an extensive list of different signalling packages based on different national standards.

The following table summarizes the packages available for Autosign, together with the legislations on which these are based.

Table i: List of packages available for Autosign

There are two main advantages for Autosign users:

  1. All the aforementioned packages are not included into the Autosign installation, but they can be downloaded separately through the Autosign interface. In this way, users can only have the package(s) related to the geographical zone of work and do not spend memory on files that are useless for them.
  2. Users do not have to wait for new Autosign version releases to find new content. We are constantly upgrading existing packages as well as adding new ones. Every time any package is added or upgraded, users have access to it immediately. As soon as we notify that one new library has been added or upgraded, users can go to “Library Manager” and download the new files.

In addition, the way in which Autosign manage the national packages is very appropriate for international projects, where users need to have available two or more different signalling packages within the same installation. With Autosign, users can change from one national package to another national package with no need to restart the installation or wait for a long loading time. In a matter of 3 clicks, users are able to set and use a different national package within the same DWG file.

Figure ii: Library Manager UI of Autosign

MOST RECENT ADDITIONS

As it was mentioned above, we are regularly implementing new upgrades for our libraries. The latest improvements have been:

  • Upgraded Czech traffic signs package – added group IS.
  • Upgraded Estonian traffic signs package – added traffic signs up to completion.
  • Released Swedish traffic sign and road markings package.

An interactive method for creating swept path analysis - Easy Drive

ROAD SYMBOLS MARKINGS CONTENT

And, of course, traffic signs are not the only thing we update and upgrade for Autosign. There is also other content that is important for the traffic signalling designs: Road markings and road symbols markings. These are provided by Autosign as well, and here we list some of the latest road markings enhancements that we have fully implemented for Autosign users:

  • Slovenian road symbols markings
  • Czech road symbols markings
  • Croatian road symbols markings
  • Serbian road symbols markings

Figure iii: Example of Slovenian road symbols markings.


If you are interested in Autosign and would like to get further information or download a free trial.