In this post, Ross talks about the categories of service levels in New Zealand on the areas of roads and utilities.
NZ ONRC Service Level Categories
And then, this was the slide I used up in Canada in July. And I take photos as a hobby so I was putting in photos on these slides, just sort of try to get Canadians and Americans to go oh, New Zealand’s nice. We should come.
So this is Mt. Cook, this photo was taken from the Visitor Center on a July afternoon, a couple of years ago.
So the thing is the ONRC service levels, within those categories are looking at value for money, safety, resilience, amenity, travel time reliability, and accessibility.
And you look at those and you go, say they are pretty good. And each of that, back to that road hierarchy, so each of those hierarchies has one of these.
So there’s what? Ten…you know about 60 service levels or whatever that come out of it. And this is still getting developed as we speak. But for any road, that is not bad… I don’t think that it is a bad set of service levels. I think that covers it pretty well.
So the thing is that you can then go, so what’s resilience mean for a national road versus an access road?
And it might mean the weak points get armored up. It might be that you’ve got alternate routes, so it might be that you’re looking at what critical services would be interrupted if you lose that bit of road. That sort of thing and on it goes.
And this one here, the top one, the “value for money” is quite a key driver because there’s never enough money.
So the question is for Kaikohe or for up Far North, how do you measure that against something in Gisborne or something in Canterbury or something in Southland or something in Auckland, and so those are the stresses and the questions in trying to even that out is quite a job across the country.
NZ Utility Service Level Categories
In terms of utilities, so this is water, wastewater, and stormwater, but for primarily, water and wastewater, I’ve done reviews of a lot of utilities, service levels, and I’ve done peer reviews.
I pulled a whole of those out when I do the slides again for the North American Conference back in July.
And these are the common themes. So the common themes are, you safeguard public health and safety. That’s, in Havelock, the Havelock water crisis, hopefully, you’ve heard about.
Just recently, people got campylobacter in their water supply and a whole lot of people got sick for a couple of weeks.
That was a failure of that particular level of service.
And the minute you do, it really hits the headlines, doesn’t it? If you make lots of people sick.
And management of environmental impacts. So that’s more for wastewater and perhaps stormwater. You don’t want to be ruining your environment as you discharge.
When you have a break or a blockage or an overflow, or whatever it is, you want people to know that you’ve organized to respond reasonably quickly to that.
You can measure such actions by a survey asking, hey look, do you like the water? Oh no my water is red and it stains the clothes in the washing machine and it tastes terrible and I can’t drink it. That’s a dissatisfied person.
So versus, oh my water is really clean and it’s pure and we all like drinking it, those sorts of things. And I don’t get sick when I drink it. And financial performance is important as well.
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