← Tools

Hatched and chevron road markings, country by country

Every drawing here is produced by the CapCad engine from that country's own norm — the same code that draws in your CAD, with the dimensions printed beside it. Nothing is an illustration.

Look for the families: 45° in Colombia, Ecuador and the UK; 2:1 (53°) in France, Spain and Portugal — and how far apart Canada spaces them.

What hatched and chevron markings mean

They fill the part of the carriageway that traffic should not normally use: the wedge where two lanes separate or merge, the space shielding a turning lane, the island in front of a physical obstruction. The stripes sit at an angle so that at speed the area reads as something other than a lane.

The border around the area is the part that carries the rule, not the stripes inside it: a broken border and a solid border mean different things, and which applies — along with the angle, the strip width and the spacing — is set by each country's own norm. Those are the documents named above each set of drawings below.

Chevrons — the V shapes — and straight diagonal hatching are two forms of the same idea. Which form a country uses, at what angle and at what spacing, is exactly what the drawings below differ about.

---