As of late I've been taking Highway/Rail/BRT CAD drawings converting them into Geodatabases (GDB) and processing these GDB's to analyze the environmental effects (wetlands, tax parcels, aquisitions, displacements, etc.) of each possible Option. While I've done this task before for many projects. I've never completed anything like this in a comparable scope.
What we have are 6 Options for a 15 mile corridor combining Bus Rapid Transit (BRT/BRT HOV), Commercial Rail Transit (CRT), and highway extension alternatives along with their stations. Each Option has 3 sub-options and there are 36 possible station scenarios. Now imagine doing about 10 geoprocessing steps for each of these 18 Alignment and 36 Stations by hand for each environmental constraint.
This is exactly why modelbuilder exists. We accomplished what took 4 months of environmental analysis that was done by hand for our Transit Mode Selection Report and finished it in 1 week (granted under immense pressure and dozens of hours beyond the 40 hour work week) for our Transit Alignment Options Report.
