Ross and Grant discussed in the earlier post, “How To Deal With Traffic Congestion and Infrastructure Expansion of Growing Cities” what should be considered before deciding on the best option to support the infrastructure needs of growing cities.
Grant:
That ties in pretty well with our next slide Ross, “It’s about the process, not the system”
And with a problem such as this, it’s very easy to focus on building a model to understand how that system works.
And while that’s important, the crucial thing is to understand what the role of a model or a system has in your decision-making process.
There are tools to actually help you understand and having a process to walk you through to gain great around understanding is really the key to that.
So while you may have a good picture of what that, as you build up your picture of what that traffic demand looks like and where your key hubs and destinations are.
You then need to build the process around over a ten-year program perhaps and how would we resolve those issues.
Ross:
I think it could be even longer than that. One of the things that you learn with asset management planning, Grant, as you well know, is you need to look out a fairway.
The thing with a city such as Nairobi and economy such as Kenya is it is very dynamic and growing and powerful economy both in African terms, I think ultimately over the next 30 to 40 to 50 years in world terms, it will become a world-class city just because of the dynamics that are going on there.
So from that point of view, it’s a matter of taking it a strategic planning view, maybe the 30 to 50-year view, what everybody thinks it is going to look like. And then breaking it down and working it out from there. A lot of work in that, but a lot of gains can be made as well.
Grant:
And it’s a real reminder I think, that asset management isn’t just an extension of engineering.
It’s very much a multi-faceted profession where we need to be working with the land-use planners, the financial people and with the decision-makers whether they’d be politicians or executives within our organizations.
So that we were working together to understand what we’re going to achieve in the long-term and how we can we best support the visitors to our areas and the residents in our areas as they go about their daily lives.
[…] so we still find this diagram very helpful and just understanding the whole of that asset management process. What isn’t on this diagram because I tried to produce it for maximum simplicity is […]