How to Optimize Your Road and Highway Designs Affordably with an AutoCAD Workflow

With roadway design and construction outsourcing costs rising and growing pressures to maximize tax dollar value, state and local governments are increasingly looking for better ways to improve transportation design projects – on a lower budget.

Outsourcing has its advantages, providing convenient access to skilled expertise while helping agencies ease their workload. The process, therefore, of moving this function back in-house is often easier said than done.

Consider the challenges:

• Many agencies still rely on antiquated 2D technology which can often lead to disconnects in design and documentation, resulting in coordination problems, costly errors, and omissions in the field. 2D also restricts the ability to consider multiple design alternatives and limits collaboration between different disciplines and stakeholders involved in any project.
• Change orders and scheduling conflicts are a big issue for civil engineers, wasting time and money. And then of course there’s the problem of applying consistent engineering standards and design rules throughout the design process and across multiple stakeholders.
• “Green” infrastructure mandates and the need to perform environmental impact analysis with each project is driving a need for intelligent model-based design, which has historically been exclusive to the architectural world.
• Software training budgets are slim; limiting what can be done with new technology to address many of these challenges.

So how and where do agencies start to address these challenges – on a limited budget? Well, many engineering firms and, increasingly, government agencies are looking to leverage Building Information Modeling (BIM) and 3D design to plan, design, build, and manage transportation infrastructure projects smarter, faster, and more affordably.

BIM has many benefits – with it agencies can more easily predict the performance of projects before they are built; respond to design changes faster; opti­mize designs with analysis, simulation, and visualization; and deliver higher quality construction documentation.

“But BIM is expensive and complex to adopt,” you say? Think again.  Autodesk offers a range of road and highway design software that includes powerful tools to support BIM processes, enabling you to design and build transportation projects better, faster, and more affordably.

Even better, these solutions are available in a single economical and convenient purchase – all in a familiar AutoCAD workflow.

Want to know more? Download this information sheet to learn more about Autodesk solutions for road and highway design.

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