5 Stair Steps

[Doménica Spielmann]

The Stair Calculator is an online tool for calculating various parameters involved in the construction of stairs. Refer to the figure adjacent to the calculator as a reference. A fraction to decimal conversion table for common fractions used in measurements is also provided at the bottom of the page.

Stairs come in many different forms, and while building a basic staircase may appear to be a simple task, there are actually a number of parameters, calculations, and building codes that must be considered. These range from the length, width, and height of specific parts of the stairs, to where doors are placed in relation to stairs; the arc of a door must be completely on the landing or floor and not be allowed to swing over steps. Below is a list of some of the most common terminology regarding stairs, as well as some commonly used building codes. Building codes or requirements can differ at a local level, and a person building a staircase should refer to the codes specific to their locations.

Run/Tread: The run or tread is the part of the stairway that a person steps on. Its length is measured from the outer edge of the step, which includes the nosing if it is present, to the vertical portion of the stair called the riser. Both nosing and riser are discussed below. When measuring the total run of a staircase, the length of the tread above the last riser is not included in the measurement. Also, when nosing is present, the total run is not simply the sum of tread length, since the overhang caused by the nosing must be subtracted from the total run.

Rise/Riser: The rise, or height of a step is measured from the top of one tread to the top of the next tread. It is not the physical height of the riser because this excludes the thickness of the tread. The number of risers, not the number of treads, is used to determine the number of steps that comprise a staircase.

Nosing: The nosing is the protrusion at the edge of a tread that hangs over the riser below. Not all steps have a nosing, but when present, the nosing is included in the length of the tread. The main purpose of nosing is to improve safety by providing extra space on which a person can place their feet.

Headroom: Headroom is the height measured from the top of a tread to the ceiling above it. While building codes for headroom are primarily intended to ensure enough room for people to comfortably use the stairs, the codes typically require far more room than the average height of a person to allow for moving larger objects such as furniture.

Stair Width: Stair width is measured from edge to edge of each side of the tread, perpendicular to tread length. While measurements of length are conventionally longer than those of width when considering rectangles, in the case of steps, the width is usually the longer side. Stair width does not include handrails.

Handrails & Guards/Guardrails: A handrail is a railing that runs up a stair incline for users to hold when ascending or descending a staircase. A guard is "a building component or a system of building components located near the open sides of elevated walking surfaces that minimizes the possibility of a fall from the walking surface to the lower level." Guards can include rails (guardrails), but can be any number of other constructions such as walls, half-walls, or even a bench.

Stringer: A stair stringer is a structural member that supports the treads and risers of a staircase. Typically, there are three in a staircase: one on each side, and one in the middle. Stringers are not always visible, but can be seen on stairs with open sides. The stringers can either be cut to the shape of each step, or in some cases, are uncut and conceal the edges of the treads.

-you said that your are using a blueprint for the stairs? -> have you already tried to just place them as static meshes?
-have you made the collision in the bp or inside the static meshe editor?
-have you changed anything at the character bp?

I had the same problem. In my case the the capsule scale was not set to 1. The character got stuck on 10cm height steps with step height set to 300. Setting the capsule scale back to 1 fixed the problem for me.

Over the last half year or so, I have been interested in visiting the stairways of the Berkeley Hills below Lake Anza, and the stairways in central and northeast areas of San Francisco. This past weekend, June 3rd through 7th, 2016, I had my chance to take a mini-vacation and walk three of four challenging routes I had planned, one in the Berkeley Hills, and then two in central San Francisco, on three consecutive days. I set out to enjoy the high density (proximity) of stairs, much higher than in Silver Lake, obtain step counts (something the locals have apparently not done and not placed online), and have great workouts. What follows is a description of my explorations, starting with Berkeley.

The full set of walk photos of the features on the above map, can be found on Facebook, in this publicly accessible Berkeley Stair Tour photo album. And here is the link to the Berkeley Hills Southeast Stair Tour Google Map, seen in the photo above.

As you can see from the map and legend, this is not an easy walk. The route starts at Marin Fountain Circle, at lower elevation (house with flag symbol at the left side of the map), and works it way up and over the top of the ridge traversed by Grizzly Peak Blvd, to Lake Anza, and then back snaking its way in a very convoluted path, up and down a number of large stairways, with three crossing points and on up/down, and another down/up of stairways along the route. The morning I walked it, was cool, almost cold and overcast, making for relatively low water consumption. so here is how the walk progressed. The start at the circle was peaceful at shortly after 7am. Below is a photo of the circle taken the afternoon before, in better lighting conditions. Marin Avenue (which we descend at the end of the route) is behind the circle rising steeply upward, and the fountain walk is to the right.

The area is wetter and vegetation more lush than we have in southern California, so there are plenty of pines, firs and coast redwoods along the route, making it part urban hike, part forest walk, as you will see in later photos. The first 20 stairways, in the early miles had relatively low step counts, in the 10 to 50 step range, and essentially all have street signs naming them as either a walk, path or steps. A few had plaques giving the history of the route. Here is the plaque for the La Loma Steps in red brick, along with a shot of the lower flight, plaque to the left, and brown street sign to the right.

After this 3.5 mile jaunt in the lower hills, we made our way to the Berkeley Rose Garden, a natural hillside formed into an amphitheater covered in rose bushes. The early morning overcast sky photo does not do it justice. Do notice that it is an ideal stair-walking location, with a long stairway with 74 steps in the background leading down to the amphitheater, with a series of shorter stairways leading up through the rose terraces, including the one I climbed in the foreground.

Beyond the amphitheater, to the left in the above photo is a nice set of restrooms, open early in the morning, and water. Here is a panorama shot of the restrooms and water, notice how nicely they blend in with the foliage, showing a stairway on the left that serves as our exit from the rose garden and back to the stair-walk route. When I run this walk as a group event, we will use the Rose Garden as our first restroom/water/snack stop.

Beyond the Rose Garden I climbed up and down a couple of smaller stair-streets to reach the first of many larger climbs for the day, on the 184 step Tamalpias stairway, which climbs through a park, but is very much a concrete stair-street like the ones we know in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles, except, you cross a wooden footbridge to reach the bottom of the stairway. Note the well crafted, curved lower flight of the stairway in the photo below to the left, and the long set of upper flights on the slightly blurry right side.

Yes, those two stairways together, one right after the other is a 338 step stairway set. And the Norgate path with 233 steps is also quite a tough climb on wooden steps. This next photo sequence shows the bottom of the stairway in the lower photo, then 4 shots along the long climb up the foliage rich hillside, reaching the 6 mile mark in the walk just past the top of the stairway.

I was definitely feeling the effort of the last 1000+ steps of climbing as I walked along a few streets to reach the start of another 8 stair-climbs, nearly 800 up-steps, and 1.5 miles of distance, prior to the mile and a half of pathway trek to the lunch stop. However, before I reached the first of those 8 climbs, three things happened. First, I found that Glendale/La Loma Park has a functioning water fountain, helpful for any future events on this route!

Then to the left of the deer, I began the 800 up steps starting with the Upper La Loma Path, which is not so much a stairway as it is a grassy hillside with some 150+ wooden blocks shoved into it, as I hope you can see in this photo below:

At the top of the Altas Path stairway, one has already traversed 45 stairways, which come much faster than they do in Silver lake, so you have less recovery time/distance between stairways, making for a more difficult kind of walk, and the uneven nature of the wooden steps adds an extra dimension of difficulty to the route. After crossing the ridge, I walked for over a mile on the Selby Trail, that first paralleled a golf course, then crossed a road to head toward Lake Anza. It was amazingly beautiful, like being in an isolated coastal forest of mixed deciduous/coniferous trees, as can be seen in the series of 4 photos below:

And then after about 3/4 of a mile on the Selby Trail, I happened upon a small stairway with 6 large steps connecting the trial down from a parking lot to the continuation toward Lake Anza. Here are two photos, the first of the stairs as I approached them from above and another after I descended them, looking back at them.

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