Communicating Infrastructure Management Issues and dTIMS Modeling

I guess that’s about what the dTIMS modeling and this conference are all about.

It’s about that optimization of expenditure but we all know that we can get away with under-investing for a while and then it shows up and then it’ll create a less than optimal expenditure profile going forward.

So coming back to our question at the start of this discussion on the money side of things is how to engage our governance and our community:

• When infrastructure is taken for granted until it is broken
• When the risk and consequences of failure are very poorly understood
• When there’s a reluctance to invest because that means higher taxes or charges
• Where there are more pressing societal needs, safety, and security, and data plans
• Where infrastructure is getting more sophisticated, so there are more add-ons to the system and so that equals more expensive
• And higher service levels are expected. So particularly in the water utility, higher levels of water treatment and better of control on that
• And at the same time, capital investment is down, renewals are coming, risks are increasing and factors of safety are unknown

So how do we communicate this?

Yes, here at the Deighton conference we know about the good use of dTIMS models and the results. This one is from New Zealand.

It was so good that we put it into the 2015 revision of the International Infrastructure Management Manual.

So it’s showing a 20-year profile of investment out to 2034 at various budget levels. Various resurfacing scenarios.

And you have to see the one on the left-hand side, which is 26-ish kilometers a year for this particular – it is a quite small authority. Probably spending too much at that point but they don’t want to be right back at 13, not going to get an optimal result.

But maybe 17 or 20 is the right number for them, so we can do that sort of modeling on pavement servicing.

We can come up with some really good analysis. We can communicate that. In this particular community they did, they reduced their investment.

They were pretty confident about that and it wasn’t going to have adverse effects on their network.

So that was a really good return on investment for them and a really good return for quite a small roading network in New Zealand.

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PHOTO CREDIT: Juan Alberto Garcia Rivera via Flickr Creative Commons License