TIA Helper, or "TIAH" for short, is an application written for traffic engineers for use in the course of analyzing and reporting on intersection traffic impacts. TIAH installs within AutoCAD(R) a set of user-friendly tools that eliminate the need to manually transfer intersection volume data from the traffic model to a drawing or exhibit. TIAH allows you to quickly and effortlessly show intersection volumes generated by Traffix(TM), Synchro(TM) and other models in your CAD exhibits, saving countless hours previously wasted on manual data entry. Intersection volume data stored in Excel can also be used with TIAH.

The automated process achieved with TIAH saves time and results in zero-error exhibits. With TIA Helper, you will shave off many hours of unnecessary labor and increase profit margins on your Traffic Impact Studies.

Overview: TIAH is designed to work with the full release of AutoCAD 2000 through 2007. There seem to be third party products claiming to enable AutoCAD Lite to work with external programs but we have not tested TIAH in such configurations and do not provide support for TIAH under AutoCAD Lite.

• Block style selection dialog - ability to select the desired intersection volume symbol for each session (drawing), from a library of symbols provided with TIAH. Users can add their own, custom-designed symbols to the library.

Benefits of Using TIAH:

These benefits add up to:

• Higher profit margins on TIA production
• No embarrassing re-work due to numeric errors

That's correct - with TIAH, there are no more client comments and re-work caused by volume errors in your exhibits. You can evaluate and graphically depict the results of as many scenarios as you like - exhibit updates take seconds! TIAH turns today's drudgery into a Fun, Quick and Painless task. Manual approach volume entry into your exhibits can take hours and the effort grows almost exponentially the more intersections you need to show. This can (and does) affect your TIA profit margin. By eliminating manual labor associated with these types of exhibits, your traffic impact study profits will increase, often significantly, right away! As a matter of fact, you will noticeably reduce TIA production cost the very first time you use TIAH.

Manual Data Entry vs. Doing it with TIAH:
For illustration, lets compare the typical, manual process of developing an exhibit to doing it with TIAH. Traffix is used in this example but the process is very similar for users of Synchro.

Manual Proces
1. Run Traffix model (e.g. AM peak scenario for "total traffic at buildout").
2. Print a multiple-page paper report from Traffix with calculated intersection volumes
3. Create a base AutoCAD figure with "intersection circles" (placeholders for turning volumes).
4. Manually transfer every volume value (i.e. NBL, NBT, NBR, SBL, SBT, etc) for every intersection from the printout to the "intersection circles" in AutoCAD.
5. Visually compare every intersection volume in the AutoCAD exhibit to every value in the printout, looking for errors. That's up to 24 numeric values per intersection! (This is a very time consuming and error-prone step, which quickly eats into your profits. And now, you can eliminate it entirely.)
6. Correct the values in the exhibit as needed. (An error-prone process in itself).

With TIAH
1. Run Traffix model
2. Save Traffix intersection volumes to a text file with a couple of mouse clicks.
3. Inside AutoCAD, use TIAH to bring the Traffix volumes in (takes as little as few seconds). Done!