Infrastructure Maintenance and Sustainability

Posted on 2011/03/16 | Leave a comment

Infrastructure needs maintenance; there’s no escaping it.  Storm-water drains get clogged with trash and debris; they must be cleaned out.  Steel bridges must be repainted from time to time to keep corrosion at bay.  If the joints and cracks in pavement are not kept sealed, water seeps into the soils underneath the slab and erodes the road’s load-carrying capacity.  Water purification filters must periodically be cleaned to keep doing their job.  Burned-out lights must be replaced. When a meter breaks, a guardrail is destroyed, or a pipe cracks, it must be fixed, patched, or replaced.  Failure to perform needed maintenance diminishes infrastructure’s performance or reduces its service life or both.

While maintenance is important—indeed crucial—it is often neglected.  Day-to-day maintenance activities have not the scale and scope to attract and hold people’s attention the way new construction does.  Politicians do not get to cut ribbons and shake hands when maintenance is successfully completed.  When budgets are tight or workloads are heavy, it too often seems easy to put off maintenance without immediately serious consequences.  It is often easier for infrastructure managers to find resources for repairs and replacements than for normal maintenance and preservation efforts.  This problem of maintenance is ubiquitous and seemingly unavoidable.

We should know better. We have those old sayings: “A stitch in time saves nine.”  “For want of a nail” to shoe the king’s horse, the war and kingdom are lost. Deferring and neglecting maintenance increase the rate of wear and tear on infrastructures, increase the chances of an early breakdown.  The costs of premature repairs and replacements exceed what it would have cost to do the maintenance.  Infrastructure professionals speak of the “life cycle cost” of infrastructure, the total of all spending required to build and operate facilities to provide the services we want for an expected number of years; neglecting maintenance almost inevitably is more costly.  “Pay me now or pay me later.”

Knowing that our tendency is toward neglect, we try to design and construct facilities that need as little maintenance as possible.  It may be argued that this strategy increases life-cycle costs, for example when labor is abundant or capital is scarce, but human nature makes it a wise one.  This then is the first step toward sustainable infrastructure: it should not require much care.

While maintenance requirements may be minimized, it is unlikely they can be altogether eliminated for most infrastructures.  The second step toward sustainability is to ensure that required maintenance is carried out.  This is a matter of social and institutional relationships.  Roman roads and aqueducts were kept up through military supervision under strong central government control. A monastic clergy served the function very well for the Roman Catholic Church’s network of European cathedrals and shrines during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Balinese water temples have successfully maintained the structures and operating rules safeguarding rice production on the Indonesian island.  The demands many universities make of major donors, that anyone wishing to support construction of a new building must also be willing to donate funds to endow maintenance of that building and its grounds is a modern adaptation of such practices.

But even with proper maintenance, infrastructures age and components wear with usage.  Earthquakes, storms, and evolving patterns of use, while possibly anticipated in general, may cause unpredictable specific damage at unpredicted times.  The third step toward truly sustainable infrastructure then is this: it must be possible to fix it quickly and with relative ease when it fails.  The designers of San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit, for example, recognizing the risk that seismic activity might shift the soil and rock through which tunnels were built, arranged for excavation of larger chambers where a tunnel crossed a fault line, to allow tacks to be quickly realigned following an earthquake. 

In short, sustainable civilization requires the support of sustainable infrastructure. Sustainable infrastructure (1) needs little care, (2) is well cared for, and (3) is fixable.

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Talking better infrastructure

Posted on 2011/03/08 | Leave a comment

Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell recently opined that “The proponents of infrastructure investment have yet to close the sale with the American people…” (The Infrastructurist Forum, Feb. 15, 2011) that the nation’s infrastructure needs “repair and revitalization.” 

It hasn’t been for lack of trying.  Every newsworthy disaster stirs up swarms of dire warnings: the 2010 gas pipeline explosion that leveled a neighborhood in San Bruno, California; the rush-hour collapse in 2007 of an Interstate highway bridge in Minneapolis; or the 2009 crash of two trains on Washington, DC’s, Metro subway.  Following the example set two decades ago by the National Council on Public Works Improvement, the American Society of Civil Engineers periodically issues its Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, giving it a solid “D” in 2010.

The trouble is, things don’t look so bad to the average person on the street.  Most of us get up in the morning, turn on the lights, brush our teeth, travel to work on paved roads, and are unsurprised when the garbage in our wastebaskets disappears without a trace.   Most of us only read about disasters or watch the video, even when the areas affected reach such grand scales as the destruction of New Orleans and the electrical blackout of the continent’s northeast.  Talk about necessary maintenance and fixing problems and most of us simply tune out.

In the summer and fall of 2010, Maslansky Luntz and Partners (a communications strategy firm) conducted a series of “listening sessions” around the country to learn about why the voters in some states and localities have been willing to increase their taxes to pay for their road systems while so many of our elected officials adamantly resist even mentioning the idea.  The work was done at the request of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, under the National Cooperative Highway Research Program.

What the listeners found was that people expect their taxes to pay for maintenance; it’s a given.  If those who are responsible for the roads and bridges say that maintenance is being neglected, then they simply haven’t been doing their job, even if the reason is there’s not enough funding.

Modernizing, however, improving technology, making things work better…. That’s another story!  Fixing the traffic lights so that you never have to sit at a red light when there’s no traffic on the cross street…. That’s worth paying for!  Clearing traffic crashes and mishaps quickly to get the traffic moving again; synching bus and train schedules to ensure that a trip by transit goes smoothly, and making sure that there’s a backup bus for when the train does run late; providing better mobility generally, that’s what people want and will pay to get.

Extending the message to all infrastructure (and to appropriate a phrase), “It’s the service, stupid!”  Infrastructure is a matter of steel and cement only to those who design and build the bridges, dams, and pipes that carry our vehicles, drive our water and electric power systems, and bring fuel to our homes.  The essence of infrastructure for most of us is the services provided: If we want to close the sale, we have to offer more and better service, not simply a legacy system in a state of good repair.

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How Much Infrastructure Spending Is “Enough?”

Posted on 2011/02/26 | Leave a comment

Concern for the state of our public works infrastructure seems to have percolated to the forefront of current political discourse.  The web-based news and commentary site The Infrastructurist, for example, recently presented their “First Annual Infrastructurist Forum” on the future of U.S. infrastructure, attracting statements from such luminaries as Representatives John Mica (R-Fl) and Nick Rahall (D-WV), Chairman and Ranking Democratic Member, respectively, of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee; real-estate development expert turned pundit Chris Leinberger of The Brookings Institution; and Forbes magazine columnist Joel Kotkin.  Reports on both the national political scene and local issues in The New York Times, TheWashington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and other print media outlets feature the term almost daily.  There has not been so much attention to the topic since the months following the 1981 publication of America in Ruins: Beyond the Public Works Pork Barrel, by Pat Choate and Susan Walter.

Choate and Walter warned that government spending on infrastructure had failed to keep pace with the nation’s needs, causing our public facilities to wear out faster than they were being replaced.  The book sparked national debate about not only how much we should be investing in infrastructure, but also whether such public investment is worth making.

Suggesting that we were not then spending enough, Bill Clinton’s 1991 presidential campaign included a promise to “rebuild America,” but an $80 billion program proposed early in his first term never made it through the Congress. A recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report shows that total annual public spending for transportation and water infrastructure was higher in 2007 than in 1991, when viewed as a percentage of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) the amount has declined steadily for four decades. (Public Spending on Transportation and Water Infrastructure, November 2010)  Whether or not America was “in ruins” in 1981, the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2010 issued a Report Card for America’s Infrastructure with an overall GPA of “D.”

On the question of whether public investment in infrastructure is worthwhile, economists have bickered about the measureable rate of return on investment.  Such academic heavyweights as David Aschauer, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Alicia Munnell featured prominently in the late 1980s and 1990s.  A truce was called (or perhaps interest in an unwinnable dispute simply flagged) with widespread agreement that the rate of return, observed at the level of the nation or large regions, had been at least positive in recent decades.  Researchers continue to document examples of quite reasonable returns. (For example, nearly 16% on transportation investment; Alfredo M. Pereira and Jorge M. Andraz, 2005, “Public Investment in Transportation Infrastructure and Economic Performance in Portugal,” Review of Development Economics 9:2 (177-196))

So an argument can be made that public investment does yield net returns.  But how much investment is needed to maintain productivity and growth?  Walter Rostow’s seminal book The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto appeared in 1960, asserting that economies launching into modern industrial growth show investment rates rising from about 5% of the national income to 10% or more. The CBO study shows U. S. investment in transportation and water infrastructure has been below 2.5% for some years; allowing for spending on other infrastructure (such as waste treatment facilities or schools, for example) would certainly increase this percentage, quite possibly to a level within Rostow’s range. 

Economist A. O. Hirschman, at about the same time that Rostow’s work was being completed, argued that temporary shortages of infrastructure can be tolerated, that facilities can be built later to catch up with demand derived from private industry’s growth.  (The Strategy of Economic Development, 1958)  He went on to suggest that what retards economic advance in most cases is a shortage of management capability rather than physical facilities.  More recent analyses have provided supporting evidence. (Charles R. Hulten, “Infrastructure Effectiveness as a Determinant of Economic Growth:  How Well You Use it May Be More Important than How Much You Have,” 1996 and 2005)

What has been neglected in all of the analyses that I have seen is an explicit consideration of maintenance spending, as distinct from investment.  Infrastructure, like most engineered systems, requires periodic care to keep it functioning properly.  Leaves, trash and other debris clog drains that channel rainwater away from roadways must be cleaned out.  Filters that remove silt and bacteria from drinking water must be flushed.  The costs of such maintenance effort typically are accrued in different accounts from those the represent “investment.”  But if maintenance is neglected, the quality of services and longevity of facilities will be impaired.  My discussions with people who manage maintenance in public works agencies suggest that maintenance budgets are often squeezed, forcing neglect.

In the absence of data and solid analysis for estimating appropriate levels of spending, I have found that many facilities managers use as a rule of thumb that about 2% of the current replacement value of the facility should be spent annually on routine maintenance.  (For example, see Committing to the Cost of Ownership: Maintenance and Repair of Public Buildings, 1990, The National Academies Press, the report of a study I worked on with a number of government facilities managers.)  Spending less (assuming the money is used effectively) risks premature deterioration and failures.  Failure of the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis in August 2007 and rupture of a 66-inch water main in suburban Washington, DC, in December 2008 are two of many examples of such risks becoming reality. 

The point is, we really do not know how much we need to spend for our infrastructure.  But the evidence suggests we need to spend more than we do now.

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Intelligent Infrastructure: ITS, Smart Grid, SCADA, and More

Posted on 2011/02/21 | Leave a comment

High on anyone’s list of evolving innovation in our infrastructure would have to be the adaptations of electronics, communications, and information technologies that will make the systems “smart.”  There is little chance that the new infrastructure will ever approach passing a Turing test, but certainly these “intelligent” systems will give us enhanced return on our investment.

The essence of what is happening has three elements.  First, increasingly powerful and low cost digital electronic devices are giving us greater ability to monitor and exert control of the condition and use of roadways, pipes, cables, and other physical constituents of our infrastructure. Second, we are learning how to send very large amounts of information between these geographically widespread infrastructure components and more centralized locations where human managers can make judgments about the systems’ performance and make adjustments in operations.  Finally, our growing ability to store and use information is allowing us to comprehend more fully the factors that affect system performance and how to manage our infrastructure more effectively.  The progress of change looks different in each of our infrastructure’s several functional service areas. 

In water supply and wastewater management, for example, we have Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems being adopted.  The concepts, hardware, and software have been derived from process control in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries.  Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have grown out of traffic signaling but increasingly relay on wireless telecommunications and communication between vehicles and the roadside.  The United States government reserved a segment of the radio-frequency spectrum at 5.9 GHz for use by the transportation sector.  Electric power utilities are increasingly committed to the “smart grid” concept that includes giving electric suppliers an ability to adjust users’ demand and to shift energy supply across a network to meet short-term peak loads.  Transmission of digital data across power lines as well as via fiber optic cables and wireless channels has been important in the smart-grid’s development.

The most immediate payoff of this increasing intelligence in infrastructure will be greater efficiency in operations.  A universally applied principal of engineering in the past has been the inclusion of a “safety factor” in calculations to decide the number of lanes needed for a new highway, the diameter of the pipes for water supplies, or the generation and transmission loads to be met by the power supply.  The safety factor represented an allowance for uncertainty, a multiple of what the planners and designers estimated to be the maximum load a facility would have to meet during its service life, perhaps 30%, 80%, or 120% to this maximum.  New practices are shifting to a statistical view of the world and probabilistic measures are taking the place of safety factors, but the result is still the same: infrastructure facilities are built with redundancy and excess capacity to enhance their reliability in the face of anticipated variations in demand.  Increasing the smartness of these systems offers potential cost savings by allowing total system-wide excess capacity to be reduced without sacrificing reliability in meeting peak demands in parts of the system.

A second payoff of increasing intelligence will be enhanced ability to charge all users of infrastructure for the services they receive.  The services of infrastructure are for the most part available to all, approximating the conditions economists use to define a “public good.”  If the taxpayers of a particular community choose to build good roads in their region, it is difficult for them to exclude road users from neighboring communities from using the roads to travel to and through the area.  This is the “free rider” problem.  Installation of meters substantially eliminates the problem for power and water supplies (except in places where people are able to divert supplies—to pirate, in other words—as is the case in many cities in lower-income countries.)  For roads and waste management, smarter technology has yet to be developed and adopted.

Another payoff will be improved ability to identify the use of public resources that now have low or no market value.  Use of the atmosphere and surface waters as a repository of for our wastes is an example of (again using the economists’ term) “free goods.”  More precise detection and monitoring will enable pricing of these goods, both discouraging their use and generating revenue to be used for resource recovery and renewal.  Periodic inspection of motor vehicles to ensure that emissions-control devices are functioning properly is a rudimentary step toward this aspect of system intelligence.

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Flying Over Batam—Infrastructure of a New City and its Economic Development

Posted on 2011/02/20 | Leave a comment

I used Google Earth to visit Batam Island in Indonesia last week.  The trip was certainly easier than the nearly 24 hours of flying and layovers required when I made the trip from Washington two decades ago, and the view from above was an exciting indication of changes on the island.  But it was no substitute for being there in person.

Batam Centre in 2011, as viewed with Google Earth.

Google Earth view of Batam Centre, 2011

I spent Christmas of 1983 with a band of like-minded planners and architects on Batam Island.  The rooms that we occupied were converted shipping containers, at one of the few hotels available.  The power went out on Christmas Eve, an almost daily occurrence, as we gathered with flashlights and candles in one room to open a few gifts thoughtfully provided by our colleagues back home.  With the tropical rain pouring down, we turned in early to be ready for the big day to come.

The story started a year earlier.  Planning Research Corporation was engaged by the Batam Industrial Development Authority (BIDA), then part of Indonesia’s Ministry of Technology, to prepare a master plan for Batam Centre.  (British spelling seemed to be the norm for English usage in Indonesia.)  We were teamed with an Indonesian firm, P. T. Atelier 6.  Prof. Dr. Eng. B. J. Habibie, Minister of Technology and Chairman of BIDA, was determined that Batam should be a free-trade enclave and focus for economic development as part of the Straits of Malacca (Singapore Straits) region.  (Habibie, who later became the president of Indonesia, continues to influence the island’s development.) The governments of Singapore and Indonesia had agreed to cooperate.

Batam, on the Malacca Strait (Singapore Strait)

Batam's location, near Singapore

Batam is located about 20 km southeast of Singapore, a short hydrofoil ride from that high-tech island nation.. Batam Centre was to be the administrative and commercial core of the island, a thoroughly modern enclave that would be a comfortable entry for foreign investors and an attraction for vacationers seeking a taste of Indonesia’s rich and colorful culture. As project manager and team leader, I was determined that the plan should be a practical roadmap and model for improved living standards in a growing economy as well as a resource for marketing a nation.

We conducted the usual economic analyses and demographic studies to project plausible population and income scenarios for the island and our emerging concepts of the new city’s role in the region.  We extracted organizing principles from lessons learned about traditional villages and urban form, the social structure of Indonesia’s communities and neighborhoods, and the layers of government established to provide infrastructure and social services.  We studied the topography, soils, hydrology, flora and fauna to understand the environmental opportunities and constraints that should shape development. 

We thought about the educational and training requirements to produce a workforce to be employed by the businesses that might be attracted to Batam.  We projected the demand for housing, schools and health care facilities, transportation, water, power, and waste management.  We prepared tables of numbers, maps, sketches, and models.  Batam Centre—an imagined place on the shores of Tering Bay, covered in mangrove and other tropical vegetation—began to assume for us all what I have come to call a “texture of credibility.”

Illustrative model of the Batam Centre plan

Batam Centre, planned on the shore of Tering Bay

Rendering of view along Tering Bay in the Batam Centre master plan

"Dreaming in the daytime" on the waterfront in Batam Centre

We shipped our maps, drawings, models, and key members of our team to the island.  On Christmas Day we presented our 20-year plan to President Soeharto and his cabinet ministers.  When one of the senior officials told me the plan seemed “very Indonesian,” I was pleased.  Another told me we had helped them to “dream in the daytime.”

Batam visitors' center, 1991

Batam visitors' center, 1991

Scottish poet Robert Burns, wrote, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men gang aft agley,” and so it was with our own scheme to continue working with BIDA to implement our Batam ideas.  By May of 1984 our work was finished, left for others to consider.  I was invited back in 1991 to review progress.  Major roads were in place and our plan was displayed in the visitors’ center BIDA had constructed on the site we had proposed. 

According to official statistics, Batam’s population today has grown about 50% from when we began our planning, to about 990,000.  There are now 66 hotels and beach resorts on the island, with 5,600 rooms available.  Foreign visitors to Batam average 100,000 monthly.  BIDA is responsible for development in the BARELANG region, the three islands of Batam, Rempang, and Galang, now joined by new highway bridges, one of Indonesia’s designated “national development engines.” 

Perhaps it was chance, but I prefer to believe that the physical, social, and economic framework our team laid out 20 years ago has served its purpose as an infrastructure for Batam Centre’s development.  If my satellite-enabled flyover is to be believed, the texture of credibility is becoming a reality.

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Reflection on Doing More With Less

Posted on 2011/02/17 | Leave a comment

Political discourse has no shortage of empty or misleading catchphrases.  A particularly popular one is that we must “do more with less.”

It has bipartisan support.  New York’s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, speaking as a Democratic gubernatorial candidate, was quoted, “We’re going to have to change our orientation in this state, and how can we do more with less. You know, every family, every business, has had to do more with less.” (Newsday; October 30, 2010) Louisiana’s Republican Governor Bobby Jindal (Business Exchange; December 06, 2010) in an interview on Political Capital With Al Hunt said “We have cut higher education by about 4.5 percent. We’re all going to have to do more with less.” 

It’s not only the politicians who say it, of course.  As the recession deepened in 2008 and 2009 and budgets came under pressure, employee’s across the private sector were told what National Public Radio’s Chana Joffe-Walt termed “four familiar words: Do more with less.” (Morning Edition; February 26, 2009)

It sounds good, conjuring up thoughts of waste reduced and fat trimmed.  But anyone who is old enough to remember when airlines provided legroom even in coach class knows that what is doing more for some can mean getting less for others. 

In an article in Forbes magazine, innovation specialist Scott Anthony had a sensible perspective. When you are told to cut your costs, you cannot really do more.  Instead, you focus on doing only what is absolutely necessary to sell your product and figure out what the customer is willing to sacrifice. (“Creative Disruption: Doing More with Less” February 26, 2009)

Anthony writes that there are three basic categories of performance objectives; (1) functional objectives relating to product performance and reliability, like provide a smooth ride or deliver safe-to-drink water on demand; (2) emotional objectives associated with the influence a product has on how customer feel about themselves, for example choosing “the best that money can buy” or opting for frugality; and (3) social objectives associated with how customers perceive others feel about them, seeking for instance to demonstrate solidarity with a group or to impress people.

When it comes to infrastructure, many people lose sight of emotional and social objectives, and they generally view even functional objectives very narrowly.  

Take our public water supply, for example. We take for granted that abundant, safe water is available at the turn of the tap.  Occasional lapses occur: a broken water main can flood a street, force residents of an area to boil their drinking water and, in the aftermath, make faucets run muddy for a time.  Bacterial contamination of two purification plants serving the Milwaukee area sickened thousands and drew international attention in April, 1993.  For the most part though, water is reliably and inexpensively available on demand and it meets quality standards set to ensure public health. (Despite improvements made in recent years, this is still not the case for a notable fraction of the world’s population.  The United Nations World Health Organization estimates 13% of world population lacks any safe drinking water source, piped or otherwise.)

Nevertheless, sales of bottled drinking water in the United States total about $11 billion annually and continue to grow.  People buy it because they think it is safer or tastes better than what comes from the tap.  They buy it because the like the look of the bottle or the idea that it is imported.  They buy it because they identify with the celebrities paid to endorse a brand.  According to water expert Peter H. Gleick we consume 30 gallons per person annually. (Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water 2010)  The marketers have figured out how to give consumers more than the bare-bones minimum of public infrastructure service.

Roman engineer and architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio wrote that a city’s infrastructure—for him,  public buildings, defensive walls and towers, and shrines and temples—should all be built with strength, utility, grace.  (De architectura, Book 1, first century BCE)  Pressed time and again to “do more with less,” we have lost much of the grace or beauty in infrastructure and, I fear, some of the utility and strength.

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