Geopak is a great program to help with roadway design in civil engineering.  Unfortunately sometimes things can get messed up.  When working with a design sometimes you will need to rerun the different models several times to get the best solution.  However, Geopak sometimes gets confused.  When that happens, Geopak can give some unpredictable results.  Sometimes it will simply give you the same results over and over no matter how you change the input.

A common thing that causes this is corrupt resource files.  So, now anytime Geopak starts doing strange things I delete the resource files.  That’s one of the first things Bentley recommends if you call them about Geopak problems.

Here’s how to do it.

First, close MicroStation and Geopak.

Depending on how you have Geopak installed on your system the directory structure may be different.  Basically go into your bentley\geopak folder.  Inside there you will have a bin folder.  Go into the bin folder and delete all of the files with a .rsc extension.

The first time you do it, back up the files before you delete them.  Just in case.

Then rerun Geopak and try it again.  This has solved a lot of Geopak problems for me.

What other tricks do you use?

It’s always nice when simple solutions are found to very big problems. According to an article from the Seattle Times rumble strips on state highways has cut the accident rate by nearly 60%.

This is one example why we should all be looking for simple solutions for our clients’ and the public’s problems when we’re working on projects.

Here’s the link to the article State report: “Rumble strips” on state highways cut accidents by nearly 60 percent