Thanks for responding. I guess I was hoping someone had a little more in-depth experience. The few demonstrations I've seen using a SketchUp model imported into VISSIM have been pretty basic and, frankly, unattractive.

I guess I've got two priorities in figuring out how the two programs might work together:

I'm not expecting to be able to produce the type of rendered animation you'd see in a high-production video game, but I'd like it to look nicer than some of what I've seen out there.

Is there some extra analytic capacity that I'm missing? VISSIM is really good for complex traffic modeling, but I was hoping that there'd be some ability to use SketchUp to add some value to that analysis by including streetscape and land use details. (i.e. What are the traffic impacts of one type of in-street transit stop vs. another?)

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a project that involves both roadway/transit design and traffic modeling. (I work for a mid-size urban planning agency. Public sector.)

My department is designing new streetcar stops for our transit authority as they roll out a new type of light rail vehicle. Meanwhile, another department is doing an operations analysis that involves modeling our streetcar lines to see what time savings (if any) might be gained from the new vehicles and stops.

The light rail vehicles operate partially in mixed traffic, so we're using PTV VISSIM to do the traffic modeling.

I know VISSIM is capable of importing .skp files, but we've never done it before. Does anyone have any experience with this? I've seen very few tutorials out there.

I realize that it can import my SketchUp model, which we can then use for animation purposes, but are there other benefits that I'm not thinking of? I think this could potentially be a very useful tool to help the public understand what these vehicle upgrades mean to them at street-level. It would be awesome, though, if there was some extra analytical component to using a SketchUp model in VISSIM.

THANKS FOR READING!