Creating a Realistic Common Path of Travel in AutoCAD Using 2024 Building Code Guidelines

Let's open up our code plan. It is sheet I-101. In this sheet, we'll notice a couple of things going on.

Number one, we have our plan, and now it's showing some more details of our project. We have some of the separate rooms this law firm needs, like a conference room, office, restroom, little break room. So that's good.

Now, we need to show some code elements, and the first one we want to show is our common path of travel. Now, this is an AutoCAD class, so we are focused on the tools we need in AutoCAD to show the common path of travel, but we want to make it as realistic as possible. So for this example, we're going to use some elements from the 2024 International Building Code.

But knowing that your situation, your city will have a different code, perhaps, and different ways to analyze this. But the key takeaway from the building code is we have to know, in this case, a distance, a travel distance, from somebody exiting the building. And so we have a couple of options.

We'll say for ours that we're an area serving less than 50 occupants, and we need to have a common path of travel less than 75 feet. So how do we accomplish that in AutoCAD? First off, we need to make sure that we are in the actual model space view, or MView. A quick way to do that in AutoCAD is to double click in the view.

Double click, and we'll notice a couple of things. Number one, we might see a view cube in the top right corner, and our border gets thicker. And the biggest telltale sign is if we use the distance tool, DI for distance, and measure across the top of our building, it's about 60 feet.

And if we were still in the sheet view and measured across, it's going to be like 16 inches. We want the actual dimensions. All right, with that out of the way, we need to have what's called a natural path of travel, which means we can't just assume that somebody can go diagonally through a room.

Why is that? Because there might be furniture in the room. Let's go ahead and turn it on. Let's go to our layers, L-A-Y-E-R, and we're looking for a layer called iFern Loose.

Find it, and we'll notice that it is frozen with the VP Freeze. So click on the VP Freeze, and that will unfreeze the furniture. We also want to change our layer, our current layer, and we want to change it to A-LifeSafe-Egress.

So double click right there, and that will set our current layer as that A-LifeSafe layer. Close that down. All right, so what is a common path of travel? It's essentially the path where you're kind of trapped.

You don't have options. So imagine being in, let's say, this office right here. I must traverse through this office past any furniture and get out the door before I have a choice of going out the front door or the back door.

But that's not a great scenario for the code because we want to kind of pick the worst case scenario, and it's not too hard or too long of a path to get out of this little office. So for our example, let's go ahead and pick the conference room as our worst case scenario. And the worst case would be somebody is standing in the corner of the room, and there is a need to exit quickly.

So they're in the corner, and so they must traverse down to this corner and then out this opening to escape the conference room. Once they're at this point, they have a choice. They can go out the front door or out the back door.

So that's the common path of travel we want to do. And you might say, well, they could just go out the back door if they broke the glass, right? That's possible, but in code analysis, we assume that they're not going to move the furniture. They're not going to throw themselves through the glass.

They're going to take a natural way to exit. All right, so let's zoom into the conference room and get started. First, we need to show a dot where the person is standing before they begin this common path of travel.

We'll do that with the circle command. So type in circle, and we'll just click in this upper right corner. We'll click one time.

Click and pull this away, and we'll do one foot. Enter. And you might be asking yourselves, why don't we measure like from the wall? It's safe to assume that the person isn't standing totally against the wall when they need to exit the building.

They're probably naturally standing kind of just in a corner, and that's okay. Now let's go ahead and fill this in, because we want to make it really obvious where this path of travel is. So let's type in hatch, and we want to select our solid hatch.

Solid, and click one time inside that circle. Click and click enter to complete that action. So there's our person.

Now we need the line, and you might think to yourself, well, let's just draw a line. And if I did that line, the problem with that tool in AutoCAD is it draws a line that's just a straight line, like from that dot, and it's just going to go like out the door. And nobody could do that without climbing up over the table, which is not a natural action, not a natural path of travel.

So let's not do the line. The special tool we want to use is called pline. It's a multi-segment or polyline in AutoCAD.

So try that command, p-l-i-n-e, enter. And we also want to turn on a couple of things. We want to make sure osnap is on.

So down at the bottom, or F3 on our keyboard, we want to turn on object snap. And we want to snap specifically on that center of the circle. So click there one time, and pull our mouse down.