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...]