We don’t want to be the guy on the right slide here, right? The thing is that engineers have too many parameters and they struggle to communicate those parameters to decision-makers. What we want to be is like Dr. Scotty from Star Trek on the left-hand side of the picture there. Where when he was …
Infrastructure Asset Management Blog
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 …
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US Infrastructure Spend and the Impact of the Recession
Coming back to US infrastructure, Long Term Spend of GDP, % of GDP. This is the Congressional Budget Office figures again. Looks pretty good, doesn’t it? The percentage of infrastructure has stayed pretty steady from the 1950s through to 2011. Just slightly tailing off but when we look at the …
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How the Recession Affected Infrastructure Funding of New Zealand
Just coming back to that New Zealand diagram, we’ve looked at that right at the start of the talk during the big recession that "Last one out turn off the lights" recession back in the late 1980s, we had the situation where our consumption of fixed capital infrastructure was higher than our …
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Infrastructure Funding – A Glimpse of the US Infrastructure Spending
And the US Transportation and Water Infrastructure Spend, if we go back, this is a long-run data set from the Economist again. You can see that big lot of capital invested not like 1960 through to 1970, operations and maintenance as a percentage of GDP has been pretty steady but just dropping off …
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Money and Its Impact on Infrastructure Management and Acquisition
So, moving on to the third part of this discussion today, we are going to talk about money and the impact of money and finance on infrastructure management and acquisition. One of the fundamental problems that we have in western society particularly is that infrastructure is taken for …
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Risk Management – How a Water Utility Incident in Walkerton Canada Influenced Infrastructure Management Practice in New Zealand
In Walkerton in Canada, in 2000, there was a water supply incident and seven people died and half the town was ill. At the end of the day, there’s a big report about that by the Canadian authorities and it was criminal negligence that caused the problem. At the end of the day, people went …
Impact of Hidden Risk to Cost – The Case of Flint Water Crisis and I35W Bridge Collapse
This is the continuation of Ross's discussion on the earlier post, "Explaining the 'Levels of Service-Cost-Risk Diagram' through Analyzing the Flint Water Crisis." He explained further by adding the case of I35W Mississippi River Bridge collapse in August 2007. So the follow-up effects …
Explaining the “Levels of Service-Cost-Risk Diagram” through Analyzing the Flint Water Crisis
What I really wanted to talk about is “Risk” and particularly this “Levels of Service-Cost-Risk diagram. And it’s coming out of some work that myself and a colleague Grant Holland who works with me did a few years ago for a ministerial taskforce here in New Zealand. That’s a bit like a… I …
Realities of Infrastructure Management
So, moving on to the realities of infrastructure management. And in this section, we took the middle section, I want to talk about levels of service. We could talk about growth and risk but we’re not really going to cover growth and a bit of lifecycle management. I want to start with this set …
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Why Does Societal Truths and Myths Matter for Infrastructure?
Ross continues to present what some reputable people say about the US economy that dispels societal myths. Towards the end of the post, Ross explains the impact of societal truths on infrastructure investment. What Warren Buffett says about America But I’m going to give the last word with …
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The US Economy is Growing – Why Society Can’t Feel It?
Niall Ferguson, in fact, is an economics history professor at Harvard and an Englishman. And he recently was in New Zealand and had a seminar that was behind the paywall so I haven’t felt that I can use it even if I subscribed to that particular service. But this one was in the public domain and …
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