Open Roads - Are you using it? Tell us more...

Aucivil,

I'm guessing you're from Huntsville?

As the one who started this particular thread, let me answer a few things. I started with InRoads at MD DOT - and we have a single main office that does design. This also did not include the toll facilities, airport, mass transit or rail. Of those, only tolls was also a MicroStation shop. Although when we migrated from IGRDS to InRoads, tolls went to GEOPAK. In fact, within our highway department, the traffic department started with Autodesk and DCA before eventually migrating to Bentley.

As DOT's go, we are pretty small potatoes. From what I understood, PA and Texas (and probably others) had district based design offices that were as big as our HQ office.
So now, I work for a minority owned firm. We have approximately 12 seats each of Bentley PowerInRoads products and 11 seats of Civil 3D. Most of my users (I'm the CADD Manager as well as a designer) have to be able to work in either. We also do a fair amount of Survey work, probably equally split too.

My plan, is to stay in Ss2 until the DOT clients develop DGNLIB's capable of being used with Ss3/4. I have seen some US COE workspaces that look promising. For my world, I even have to deal with probably 5 or 6 different level naming conventions. At least where you are, you hopefully have one.

At the DOT, the mass transit department has migrated to Bentley, but decided the V8 level names that the highway and tolls departments were using was not good enough, so they opted for a modified NCS approach xx-xxxx-xxxx. Unfortunately, their system is different than the Army Corps NCS system.

So, between Civil 3D and Open Roads, I still prefer Open Roads. The initial setup for Civil 3D is as daunting as Open Roads. Survey alone is far more complicated and their is no XIN file. Eveything must be done in a Civil 3D seat and all settings are stored in DWT (templates) so managing them is much more complicated. Are there some Civil 3D things I like? Yes. But other areas are annoyingly over complicated.

CADDCOP,

Thanks for the reply.

Yes - Huntsville is just across the river. We have 3 seats of Microstation, InRoads Suite and several of the Bentley/Haestad hydraulic products. We generally work on separate projects which are housed on our individual workstations. I feel like Microstation/InRoads Suite is geared toward multiple power users working on different phases of a project. So we are kinda using a Pile Driver to drive in a nail. But I do like the power.

Not trying to derail your thread but have have you looked into SITEOPS.

I had high hopes for Open Roads when I first experienced the power of Civil Geometry with SS1. While it is too buggy to use in SS1 I can see the potential. However since it's release (SS3) I've been reluctant to try it because it is too early in development. If Bentley offered trials I would at least be willing to try it, but they don't (unless you are on Select, which we are not).

Being a hybrid that requires converting the models and symbology to legacy format for plan production is a major obstacle to implementation. I feel it would require a lot of handholding by Bentley support (or a well trained and dedicated in house support team) to establish a practical workflow, if that is even possible at this stage. Also it appears there are still instability issues and deficiencies in the Civil Geometry technology which need to be resolved before committing to it for production use.

We've evaluated Civil 3D for years and find it is too cumbersome and is lacking in functionality for site grading, so we haven't been able to commit to it. Meanwhile we continue in limbo, unable to commit to either company's product line. At the current pace of development I don't expect to see a comprehensive usable product for at least a few more years.

I have always been reluctant to introduce yet another tool when we already pay annual fees to keep our Bentley and Autodesk seats up to date. When InRoads ran in both MicroStation and AutoCAD, we used that capability for Survey and considered extending that to design when Autodesk began phasing out Land Desktop over Civil 3D. I figured if my Land Desktop users had to learn a new software, why not make it InRoads. But then, as Autodesk was pushing 64 bit AutoCAD, InRoads was no longer an option for AutoCAD.
And since we no longer get admission to the BE conventions as part of our select fees, it is much harder to get approval to attend. So when you do get approval, you concentrate on what you have vs what you might want to get. At this point, I am lucky if I can attend once every four or five years - which in today's world, is an eternity.

No, not yet. Technology not mature enough don't want to get bad impression.