[iggldiggl]

Interesting. For infrastructure projects like roads and railways the standard I'm familiar with is still to just draw them directly based on the national coordinate system, but then again we're also still mostly outputting 2D drawings.

Thankfully it seems that at least with 2D drawings and AutoCAD the worst side effect these days is that under certain circumstances hardware acceleration causes curves/curve segments to be displayed slightly offset. Strangely (but also luckily) enough it never happens when using just AutoCAD, but only when our road/railway design add-in is active (which displays all its output inside the AutoCAD drawing itself) [1], and it doesn't affect points picked via object snapping, i.e. it's really only the display that's affected.

Our friends in structural engineering or architecture on the other hand do indeed use local coordinate systems for their 3D models, though I can't say whether that practice is absolutely universal

[1] Edit: And also in the layout view, but thankfully definitively not in regular model space, where you'd be actually editing things.