Lima VVA — The Complete Guide: Road Design and Earthwork Quantities for Small Projects
Lima VVA is an open-source (GPLv3) Windows program for road design and earthwork calculation. It is aimed at small and medium projects where simplicity and speed matter: access roads, car parks, local streets and ditches.
Lima VVA
Lima VVA (open-source project)
Road design and earthwork quantities for small and medium projects — alignment, cross-sections and volumes.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Interactive alignment — horizontal and vertical, with the geometry updated instantly.
- A road template — lanes, shoulders, median, kerbs, barriers and sidewalks.
- Cross-sections — along the whole alignment, against the existing ground.
- Cut and fill quantities — updated as you design.
- Reports and export — printouts, DXF and LandXML for further work.
Who it suits
An engineer who needs to lay out a short road or a car park and calculate quantities without heavy commercial road design software. It does not replace a full package for highways and interchanges, and the interface is currently available in English and Norwegian. The project is updated frequently.
Related tools
To build a terrain model from survey data — IQcad. For maps and GIS data — QGIS. For pavement structure design — PaveXpress.
IQcad
IQSoft
2D CAD for civil and tunnel work: TIN surfaces, point clouds and alignments. Free to use; licence terms not published.
Get it from the vendor
QGIS
QGIS.org
Open-source GIS for spatial analysis, layer work and map production.
Get it from the vendorPAVEXpress
National Asphalt Pavement Association
Online pavement thickness design based on AASHTO methods.
Get it from the vendorSurveyTools (incl. Alignment Solver)
SurveyTools (open-source project)
Surveying toolkit: network adjustment, road and rail alignment solving, coordinate transforms and levelling.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
Lima VVA gives you road design and earthwork quantities in a small, fast and completely free tool — the right size for most local projects.