Ross and Grant continue to deliberate on the topic/question that a webinar participant posted on the blog post, “Meeting Future Demand and Level of Service Needs of Fast-Growing Cities“
Ross:
So how do you go forward? From an infrastructure management point of view, the first thing that you need to do is define the service levels you’re aiming for in the longer term.
And then you can categorize your existing systems based on whether they are anywhere near meeting those service levels or not.
Grant:
That’s right. I think that’s where a hierarchical approach becomes so important because when you look at that transport network as a system, all the different components that have different roles.
So some will be local roads that enable people to move around in the area or connect up to the arterial routes. And there’ll be other roads that are clearly for mass transit and you have for public uses and passenger transport systems.
So I think it’s also the combination of how do you move goods and people around in terms of mass systems as well as what ability people have to move around with their own transport needs.
Ross:
So that’s just a very brief introduction to levels of service.
And what you will end up with is quite differentiated service levels and maybe a 20 or ten-year plan to try to get to the service levels that you wanting to do.
The second major part of asset management planning at the front end is looking at predicting your demand.
And to some extent, that’s going to be almost impossible. I mean, the amount of growth that’s going on cities like Nairobi is you’ve got a ‘lion by the tail’ in terms of what’s going on there.
So, but you’ve got to plan your asset development around some sort of model of growth.
The key thing here would be to do whatever best projection you can but also build in significant flexibility the way you can to allow the variation of that growth.
Coming off that, and I think given that there’s going to be some very large gaps in the whole – both service levels and growth.
I think looking back at cities like particularly Paris as an example, back in the… and the reason I’m picking Paris is this blog post up on Waugh Infrastructure.com about what they did.
So they had terrible roading congestion, this is back in the late 1800s. And so they produced a master plan for the city that produced the boulevards that are there now.
And so that’s my, my introduction – I think you’d be wanting to do a city expansion and growth master plan.
- Map out your main transportation, corridors and routes.
- Map out whatever grid or ring road routes you need.
- How are you planning to do it?
Then you’ll be able to define, okay these are the growth assets that we need, these are the existing assets we need to replace or upgrade or renew, and this is where the mass transit systems need to look at going.
And so that’s whether you’re going to be looking at a hub and a spoke-type model for the city or just a CBD hub type. So yes, there’s a lot of different models for city planning.
So all of those need to be in place to some degree, with some degree of determination, before you would go, oh now we’re going to build a rapid transit system.
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