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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.

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