My days of using OpenRoads Designer are behind me. I’ve moved on to contracts, lettings, and administrative support at my department of transportation. What isn’t gone though is OpenRoads Designer. In fact, it is etched into my bones and will remain there after I die. There are so many things about it I wish to shout from the rooftops and cry out from the street corners. The misunderstanding in modeling is the topic for today. I cannot stress enough how much easier your life will be if you stopped doing what everyone else is doing and started to work differently.
The number one mistake in modeling is the monolithic approach which everyone including Bentley uses.
Μονόλιθος, the Greek word monolithos, is one, singular stone.
It’s the idea of jamming every road component into one giant template. The templates used by everyone are made of the road, its shoulders, and all end conditions. And that is the simple layout. It can get as complicated as the road, its shoulders, an end condition on one side, a ditch plus retaining wall on the other side, and an end condition behind the retaining wall. This template is too complicated. The more parts a template has, or to be more specific, the more points a template has, the more complex the template gets.
Complexity does just what it suggests; it makes things complicated. Now then, you are a smart person aren’t you? What is easier to work on, a thing more complicated or less complicated? Don’t go fighting me on this. Templates do not have to stay complicated and neither do we have to stay stubborn about monolithic templates.
Hear first the benefits of a simpler template. These are the reasons to switch out of the monolithic mind set. There are no other reasons to make the switch. The benefits alone are forceful enough to convince everyone I’ve spoken to.
Benefit #1 – Simple templates are easier for you to remember.
Any super duper template that has tons of special conditions, triggers, and objects requires you, the creator of them, to remember all the functions. Anyone who’s worked on a project knows they can last years and years. Many times, the project is handed off to a teammate. There never is any sufficient documentation that explains what on earth your template does and can do and what you ought not touch. Can you remember all that next year? Next month even? If only you didn’t have this giant, complex template, then you wouldn’t have to remember all of it. Simple templates solve this issue.
Benefit #2 – Simple templates load instantly and don’t crash your machine.
A monolithic template, placed on a 1 mile long corridor, can take a long time to load. Even 30 seconds is long, since you will be making lots of adjustments to the side slopes while you’re designing. That amount of pausing, correcting, more pausing, more correcting, can take up time in your day, and even, unsuspectingly, be a cognitive burden on your mind. This loading can physically hurt you, man. Simple templates, even 20 miles long, load almost instantly. The friction encountered during corridor editing is gone as well as the burden in your brain!
Benefit #3 – Simple templates carry over to every new project.
The monolithic template is so often tailor-made to project-specific circumstances that it cannot be reused on another project without editing the template first. Time spent editing the templates never gets smaller. Editing templates is not fun and it especially is not simple if you don’t know what you are doing. Simple templates are made once and are good to go for every project you will ever face. The time is spent once, upfront, and pays for itself every time you start a new project.
Benefit #4 – Simple templates let more people help you.
Try explaining to the new grad how to use the super duper template. Did they run away? Would you trust the intern to help you? Is there anyone you do trust? The simpler a template is, the less important or heavy impacting a mistake can be. Fewer people are intimidated modeling a simple lane template compared to a 5 lane wide super template. I’ve had much less experienced folks help me all because of the simpler template idea. “You see that lane template? Place it down the alignment. That’s it. Thanks for helping!” Boom. That’s much easier than showing them your ridiculous super template that has way too many things for someone new or inexperienced to learn quickly. The lower the bar for entry is, the more people can help you. I like help. You should, too.
Benefit #5 – Simple templates can each have their own DGN.
Similar to benefit 4, simple templates let you break up your corridors into different DGNs. This means you can have multiple people working on the same road at the same time. Imagine one person figuring out end conditions on the left side, another person working on the end conditions on the right side, and another person working on the pavement templates all in their own DGNs. This idea would let a team meet harsh deadlines where one DGN with a monolithic template would cause a bottleneck in production speed.
Benefit #6 – Simple templates are easier to change later on.
This benefit harkens back to the first. When you make a change, you often have to move all the other things around the point or points you are changing. This gets out of hand when you can’t remember what each point does. Heaven forbid you blow up your corridor because you forgot that an altered point ruined several corridor objects. A simple template might only have 4 points compared to 80 on a monolithic template. There is no worry of forgetfulness or complexity when only dealing with a handful of points.
Have I missed any? Hopefully not. When you experience the benefits yourself, I’m certain you will encounter all these I’ve listed out. Now it’s time to explain myself when I say “simple template.”
Let Me Explain…
An example of a simple template can be a single lane. It can be as simple as 4 points. If you wish to add pavement layers beneath it, you’re free to do so up front or later on when you learn what the pavement schedule will look like. It doesn’t matter. Making the change, like I pointed out earlier, is easy and will not ruin your corridor if you do it later.
Anyways, let the two top points be called REF and WIDTH. The bottom two will be Z_REF and Z_WIDTH or whatever you want to call them so long as you have “Z_” in front of them. Why? Because when you assign point controls, you have to scroll through all the point names. Points starting with “Z” appear at the bottom, thus, saving you time from scrolling! Going forward, name any point with “Z_” if you do not wish for it to be used in point controls or anything else of the sorts like parametric constraints, etc.
You’re done. Fantastic. You have a lane template. The REF point is the origin point. The WIDTH point has a parametric constraint called, you guessed it, WIDTH. You will always hookup the template with REF and control the width of the lane with WIDTH. If you want, it can also have another constraint to control the cross slope. This is my personal lane template. I’ve used it for every project and everyone in my team, even the least knowledgeable, has been able to help me out by placing them all on their own.
You can go even bigger, you know. You could make this template called “PAVEMENT RIGHT” and have the REF point hook up to the centerline and the WIDTH to the edge of traveled way. See where I’m going here? The idea is to break out the monolithic templates you are used to using into smaller pieces. That’s it. You are free to make it as small of a piece as you want. This idea works on a stand alone greenway as well as a 10 lane interstate with a raised ramp in the middle and 4 retaining walls all at the same cross section. With pieces, you can build anything. With a monolith, you can only build one thing.
Everything gets simpler when you can break it down to bite size pieces. ORD is no exception. This idea truly is liberating to the mind and makes modeling so much more enjoyable. There are lots of ways to think about breaking up your corridors. I encourage you to play around with them.
