I-4 Conroy Interchange
Highway Design
Orlando, Florida
1995
I-4 Conroy Interchange
We modernized a two-lane overpass near Disney with four lanes and a loop ramp.
This view - a 3D Google Maps link - is rotated with South to the Top. I had to design it this way? Why? Because my office on the sixth floor was to the north and my desk and computer faced the site. I had a hard time having to reconcile the screen with a 180 spin to reality. So I rotated all my design files so that the views had south up. This did cause a bit of momentary confusion for the designer who took over the project when I left to start my consulting career.
There was an Aha! moment during this project:
At one point Tom, the I-4/Conroy Project Manager, came to me late in the project with his face all pale.
"Tom, what's wrong?"
"Jeff, they changed the baseline! How many days will it take to update everything? Can we get it done in a week?"
"Tom, I can have the geometry, cross sections, quantities and earthwork done in a couple of hours. It will take longer to get the cells (guardrails, etc.) on the cross sections, but all the modeling can be done in a couple of hours."
You could see right there and then as Tom - an experienced but manual designer - grasped the benefit of software. A budget- and schedule-busting change was a minor temporary blip.
Nowadays the quick-update capabilities integrate much more closely to the final sheet deliverables. Details and annotation update automatically now as well.