In the vertical alignment phase of road design, one minimizes the cost of moving material between different sections of the road while maintaining safety and building code constraints. Existing vertical alignment models consider neither the side-slopes of the road nor the natural blocks like...

We analyze the use of ℓ1-norm and Total Variation regularization within a model of road design to obtain sensible vertical alignments. With a dataset of twenty-three roads, we present a heuristic for choosing regularization parameters, and obtain cost bounds to establish a suitable choice for...