Favorite Highway Job
Foothill Transportation Corridor South - Orange County, CA (map)
This one was a blast: 18 miles of essentially virgin highway along steep foothills.
The existing terrain was close to or exceeding the maximum cut and fill slope in large stretches. This made for some VERY interesting side slope solutions. In their original limits of construction studies, they simply offset the daylight line by 18 meters (yes, metric!) for the brow ditch. Turns out, that assumption was incorrect by as 30 meters too wide to 100 meters (!) too narrow.
I was later able to incorporate the correct way to design the sideslopes into some Bentley deliverables and training (see: "Perfect" Brow Ditch on the Bentley Road Communities)
Note: in 2001, the image was the upper limit of the visualization you could do without spending a LOT of time (a simple recoloring of triangles). Nowadays, OpenRoads provides a photorealistic model - out of the box! With ConceptStation and LumenRT you could have moving traffic and palm trees with waving fronds in no time at all.
Favorite Consulting Gig
