Recently the Sustainable Prosperity, an environmental think tank based at the University of Ottowa, conducted a study, aptly labeled "New Solutions for Sustainable Stormwater Management in Canada." The study reviews the current state of stormwater management in Canada and the two most regularly employed tools: green infrastructure and Stormwater user fees. It goes into great depth exploring … [Read more...]
3 Free eBooks to Build Your Infrastructure Asset Management Knowledge
DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY! IT'S FREE! Inframanage.com is happy to publish the three-part eBook series on "Infrastructure Asset Management - Myths, Realities, and Money" These eBooks were crafted based on the topics that Ross Waugh discussed in his lecture video of his keynote presentation at the July 2016 International Deighton User Conference in Canada. The list below outlines … [Read more...]
Ultimate Secret to Successful Infrastructure Asset Management
So if we know that for sports, and we also know from the practice of infrastructure management that consistent investment also wins, why do we think we can do this, which is shown in this graph where we’ve got optimized would be spending something every year and keep the system moving forward and be able to make corrections and learn and introduce new techniques as we go along. Optimized those … [Read more...]
Winning the Infrastructure Management ‘Game’ – Lessons from the Rugby World Cup, Superbowl, and NBA
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 in a crisis he gives clear succinct replies to the captain about what could and couldn’t be done … [Read more...]
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 … [Read more...]
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 recessionary impact it’s quite clear, so this slide is the recession. A couple of indexes there. … [Read more...]
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 expenditure. You could see the big dip off in terms in that diagram at the start of that period and … [Read more...]
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 lately. The Capital was, at the height was 3% GDP, it’s now down to about 1% for both of … [Read more...]
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 granted. Transportation and water utility infrastructure are “just there” as far as people are … [Read more...]
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 to prison for it. But half a world away or the other side of the world over in New Zealand, that … [Read more...]
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 within this diagram, what’s going to happen now or what’s already happening is a huge amount of money … [Read more...]
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 guess a congressional inquiry, that sort of thing in the US. And what we recognized is that there're 3 … [Read more...]