The purpose of this document is:

a) to correct the physics that was used in the document "Minimal Road Radius for Highway Superelevation" recently submitted to the Maple Applications Center;

b) to confirm the values found in the manual for the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) that engineers use to design and build these banked curves are physically sound. 

c) to highlight the pedagogical value inherent in the Maple language to distinguish between assignment ( := )  and equivalence (  =  );

d) but most importantly, to demonstrate the pedagogical value Maple has in thinking about solving a problem involving a physical process. Given Maple's symbolic mathematics capabilities, one can implement a top-down approach to the physics and the mathematics, working from the general principle to the specific example. This allows one to avoid the types of errors that occur when translating the problem into a bottom up approach, from specific values of the example to the general principle, an approach that is required by most other computational systems.

I hope that others are willing to continue to engage in discussions related to the pedagogical value of Maple beyond mathematics.

I was asked to post this document to both here and the Maple Applications Center

[Document edited for typos.]

Minimum_Road_Radius.mw