path of travel revit

Have you tried? Revit Path of Travel Tool

When working on a building design, many factors must be balanced. One factor that must always be considered is that of life safety, where distances to the exits are essential calculations for compliance with fire codes. Revit 2020 introduced the path of travel tool to assist in measuring travel distance requirements to make fire life safety simple and fast to calculate. Both Revit 2020.1 and 2020.2 added functionality to the path of travel tool to make it even more flexible, helping you analyze exiting distances in your design in a number of ways.

The path of travel tool in Revit lets you select 2 points in a floorplan and calculate the shortest route between those 2 points, avoiding elements you have defined as obstacles. The calculated path uses a 300mm clearance allowance to keep the center of the path from passing too close to an obstacle. The path of travel tool is not able to calculate vertical distances, i.e. it does not work on stairs.

There are 3 primary calculations Revit makes, let’s review:

• Travel Distance Limit: the distance to the nearest exit
• Dead-End Limit : the distance of a corridor with no end exit
• Common Path Limit : the portion of exit access that must be traversed before two separate and distinct paths are available)

The examples shown in the videos below refer to terms in the  NFPA 101 Life Safety Code, but the principles apply to other fire codes.

You can use Path of Travel tools to help you analyze plans for travel distances related to life safety in your designs, but this is only scratching the surface of what you might be able to do. Analyze traffic patterns through a space, organize spaces to facilitate access, find optimal routes for people or other elements, etc — we’d love to hear what you do. Share with us in the comments below if you’ve found a helpful way to use Path of Travel.

Without further ado, here’s a short tutorial on the path of travel tool, starting with how to make life safety calculations.

Maximum travel distance to the nearest exit

Typically, you will be able to narrow down which room(s) are going to have the maximum travel distance in your design.  Use the path of travel tool to verify your assumptions and quantify the actual travel distance. In the video below 2 path of travel lines are added to the most distant corners of the room farthest from the exits. By looking at the schedule view of the path of travel lines, Path ‘A’ ends up being just slightly longer than path ‘B’.

Path ‘A’ goes diagonally through the middle of the room, this may not be realistic when possible furniture placement needs to be considered. In the video below a waypoint (a Revit 2020.2 enhancement) is added to the path of travel line and the path altered so it goes around the edge of the room avoiding possible furniture placement in the room. Once this is considered, Path ‘B’ ends up being a shorter path to an exit.

Dead-End Limit

You can also check for dead-end corridor length. Looking at the same plan from before, a design change has created a dead-end corridor condition. In the video the length is checked by placing a path of travel line from the exit position to the end of the corridor without an exit. In this video you will see a view filter added to the view to change the color of the path of travel line as it exceeds the allowed length of a dead-end corridor.

Common Path Limit

When multiple rooms or spaces share a portion of the exit path it is known as a “common path”. The common path limit is how much of the overall exit path can be part of a common path. Use the path of travel tool to reveal common path conditions in your designs. In the video you see exits from 2 rooms that have a common path before they reach a point where 2 distinct paths to exits are available.

Have a question or cool path of travel use case? Tell us about it in the comments.

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Update a Path of Travel

You can update a path of travel line manually when model geometry has changed.

• Select a Path of Travel line.

The path of travel is recalculated and adjusted for any changes made to the model geometry.

Optional: Use grips on the start and end points to manually reposition the starting and ending position of the path of travel line.

Related Concepts

• About Path of Travel
• Path of Travel Instance Properties
• Technology Preview: People Flow Toolkit

Related Tasks

• Place a Path of Travel
• Reveal Obstacles
• Video: Place a Path of Travel
• Add or Remove Waypoints from a Path of Travel
• Video: Path of Travel Waypoints

Related Reference

• Route Analysis Settings
• Path of Travel Calculations

Revit 2020: New Feature – Egress Path of Travel

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Video: Place a Path of Travel

Add a Path of Travel line to a plan view of the model. The Path of Travel generates a line indicating the shortest path of travel between the 2 selected points.

This video demonstrates the following:

• Select a start and end point for a path of travel.
• Modify obstacles in the route settings dialog.
• Update a path of travel.
• Tag and schedule path of travel elements.

Use the Path of Travel tool to calculate the distance and time of travel between 2 points in your model.

You must be in a plan view to analyze the model and generate a path of travel. On the Analyze tab click Path of Travel. Now select the beginning point of the path as the first point and then select a 2 nd point as the end of the path of travel. In this case we are analyzing the distance from the far corner of this dining room to the exit door.

The path of travel is generated and displayed. Notice the path is considering the tables in the dining room as obstacles in the path of travel and the path is calculated around them.

Change elements considered obstacles during the analysis in the route settings dialog. On the Analyze tab, click the dialog launcher arrow on the route Analysis panel. In the route analysis dialog you can see hidden elements, demolished elements, and underlay elements are never considered obstacles, in this example we want to do a second path of travel analysis without the tables. One way to do this would be to hide the tables in the view, but in this case we will add the furniture category to the list of elements not considered obstacles.

Enable the additional categories and then select the furniture category. The route analysis setting dialog also allows you to change the analysis zone of the path of travel. The default top and bottom settings typically establish a reasonable analysis zone to achieve a good result. Click ok to exit the dialog with the additional furniture setting enabled.

Place another path of travel selecting similar points. You can see the second path ignores the tables in the dining room.

If a model changes geometry it may be necessary to recalculate a path of travel. In this example a wall is added to the dining room, the path of travel needs to be altered to accommodate this change. Select the path of travel and click update on the contextual tab. The path of travel is recalculated and regenerated using the original starting and ending points. Note the current route analysis setting are used so to update the path with furniture as obstacles, this need to be changed prior to updating.

Select a path of travel and in the properties palette you can see the total length and the time of travel. Path of travel lines can be tagged and scheduled like other elements in your model. You can also use the parameters of the path of travel lines to apply visibility and graphics overrides. In this example an override has bee applied to path of travel lines greater than an allowed exiting distance.

Use path of travel lines to help inform your decisions about your design and make changes to optimize the layout of a design.

Related Concepts

• About Path of Travel
• Path of Travel Instance Properties
• People Flow Toolkit

Related Tasks

• Place a Path of Travel
• Reveal Obstacles
• Update a Path of Travel
• Add or Remove Waypoints from a Path of Travel
• Video: Path of Travel Waypoints

Related Reference

• Route Analysis Settings
• Path of Travel Calculations

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