road width

[keitaro]

so i don't have a nscale car atm but want to know  how much distance is fine for 2 tomy cars next to each other

 

I don't want onroad parking so just an avg of how think a 2 lane road would be

 

tHanks

[Mudkip Orange]

2x 3m lanes at 1:150 = 40cm = about 1.5". That's a numbered state highway in a rural area.

 

In a town? A lot of those are much narrower. Maybe as little as an inch, or less.

[cteno4]

Keitaro,

 

actually you can get away with a little selective compression on roads if you like. i have fiddled with a lot of road printing for my ttrak modules and tried some selective compression and found that you could squeeze main roadways by 10% or more and still looked fine. in fact i found more prototypical main roadway lane widths looked a tad too big. its one of those things where things at scale sometimes dont give the impression you are looking for that you see at real size. you also usually see roads at a totally different angle on a layout than you see in real life. in our minds we remember roadways from the perspective or being on the sidewalk or in a car and things look much closer together at those points of view. on a layout you are usually looking from above and you see the road spacing much more and things tend to look further apart. this is the main problem i have with the kato streets, while prototypical wider streets, they just look too wide to me in scenes when you look at them on a layout. they tend to give the look of a wide main street usa than the more cramped streets of japan. i realize many streets are that wide in japan, but from my on the street view memories it just does not match in many cases.

 

you might play with printing out some streets with a few widths and put them down to see what looks best for you.

 

i guess its all in if you want to be exactly prototypical or do something that gives the right picture in the viewers mind. being from the exhibit world im always into what you can do in the viewer's mind rather than the exact replica. its all in what you enjoy.

 

cheers

 

jeff

[KenS]

In a town? A lot of those are much narrower. Maybe as little as an inch, or less.

 

I ran across "Driving in Japan" document (PDF, but site generates a security error so you may not want to download it) that says that on-street parking is only permitted if there would be 3.5m to the side of a parked car to allow traffic to pass.  That's probably a good definition of the smallest "normal" one-lane road, which works out to 23mm in 1:150 scale.  However, it's possible that there are smaller one-lane roads.

 

The smallest lane width I've been able to find documented (for a multi-lane road) was 3m (20mm in scale), but that was for a highway, not a side street, so narrower lanes are likely.  However, I also found an academic paper (PDF) that cited 3.0m as a typical minimum lane width.

 

And as Jeff noted, "correct" lanes may look too large. A mock-up of a street or scene to help visualize how cars and buildings look in relation to the road width is a really good idea.

[Mudkip Orange]

I've watched a LOT of timelapse Japanese driving videos (blasphemy... I like cruisin' as much as I like trains), and you're both right and wrong on the 3.0m lane width.

 

What they do when they don't have 3.0m is delete the center line. So if you have a 7m road that necks down to 5m for a stretch, the centerline will end, and then will resume again once the road widens out enough to accommodate two standard-width lanes.

 

Of course modern Kei cars are only 1.48m wide, and even an Elgrand is only 1.8m, so you'll see cars zipping by each other on these unstriped segments as if there was no difference.

 

As far as minimum total road width, Japan doesn't really differentiate between "road" and "pedestrian path" like the US and Europe do. There are a lot of lanes in urban areas that are basically "you can drive on this, if you'll fit," there are a lot of alleys that will fit bikes but not cars, and then of course there are little pedestrian side-alleys that are barely wide enough for one person.