A Workflow Concern
I’ve only worked on one dense urban project in OpenRoads so far. I did, however, make an observation about the current way my DOT is requiring driveways to be designed. If Geopak’s driveway design was wishful guessing then OpenRoads’ driveway design is forensic science. I’ll attempt to explain that weird metaphor. Geopak makes a “profile” of the driveway by making half a cross section perpendicular to the main road. Some users make a true profile. Either way, they then make maybe one or two cross sections along the driveway and with their big thumb sketch in where the slopelines may be. Keep in mind, property owners are payed their dues by calculating this stitched together area. Moral reservations aside, this is usually all the time the project had budgeted to investigate each driveway.
The new workflow with OpenRoads is quite a drastic change. In short, each driveway is to be treated like a side road. The driveway proper is given a corridor and end conditions while its intersection also gets modeled out. This is much better when we think of truly designing every feature like the driveway ditches which are usually an after thought or not thought of at all. But this is such a large difference that every project manager ought to know ahead of time. Driveways will take many more resources than previously required. Because of this increase of resources, driveways and their work are now more precious and need to be protected when changes come.
A Plug for the 3D Linear Method
I have not had the opportunity yet but I would like to see how the 3D Linear Method might help with risk management and how it might speed up this long workflow. I’m not too much of a fan of bulky civil cells though they have their uses (just don’t do the corridor clipping part). I’d just scoot the main corridor’s shoulder or curb and gutter templates to be at either end of the civil cell. If the civil cell could be used to model the driveway intersection, then I would try to place the driveway pavement as a corridor followed by two corridors for end conditions, one on either side so I could manipulate them independently if I needed to.
I cannot think of how this might be different than the conventional method here but I would predict that after the 50th driveway, things would start getting slower in the DGN files. I’d make three DGNs. One for driveway civil cells, one for driveway pavement corridors (anything that isn’t an end condition), and one for all the end conditions. It sounds longer but it would allow for multiple people working at the same time on the driveways. I’d also predict that, with the civil cells isolated to their own DGN, the rest of the model work would be quicker with loading. If I remember right, the DOT guide says to apply the civil cell in the main corridor file which to me sounds like a death wish since that would over time slow the file down to an unbearable level. Civil cells are resource heavy.
I’ll admit that there are many more people out there that are experts at this. Perhaps as time goes on, I will find out that my thoughts here are wrong. I’d be very glad if that is the case. Here in my state, it feels like the Wild West but without any sherif and without any law to enforce. Maybe another way to say it is that we are all blind men trying to guide each other. Our state is in its adolescence stage as it figures out even how to tell its managers how to open the darn software. Until it matures, which I hope is soon, people like me are going to have to test some methods out to see what works best with the least amount of risk and issues later on.
