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2 Infrastructure Performance and its Measurement
Pages 32-45

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From page 32...
... Facing such questions and contingencies, providers, users, owners, and neighbors of the facilities and services of infrastructure typically differoften widely-in their views of the relative importance of any single aspect of infrastructure. As a multifunctional system, infrastructure provides a range of specific services that differ substantially from one mode to another (e.g., transportation, wastewater management)
From page 33...
... The committee agreed that no single indicator or index is likely to be a sufficient practical measure of infrastructure performance. Table 2-1 thus became the point of departure for the committee's efforts, and in key aspects the committee diverged substantially from the NCPWI's earlier work.
From page 34...
... Compliance rate Compliance with Treatment Number of plants Reserve capacity designated stream Miles of sewer filtration/inflow uses (local) Volume treated Sewage treatment plant Fraction of population downtime served Sewer moratoria
From page 35...
... These costs are incurred in planning, construction, operation, maintenance, and sometimes demolition of facilities. There are costs of using the facilities to provide services, of monitoring and regulating the safety and environmental consequences of these activities, and of mitigating adverse impacts of infrastructure.
From page 36...
... PERFORMANCE COMPARED WITH OTHER CONCEPTS: NEED, DEMAND, AND BENEFITS As the committee defines it, performance is related to other concepts used in infrastructure management and decision making. One such concept is "need." The term and its underlying engineering concepts appear widely in public works policy analysis, especially as a basis for determining appropriate levels and allocation of state highway construction monies.
From page 37...
... Urban highways are said by some people to have been responsible for urban sprawl and weakening of the sense of community needed to sustain older residential areas. Extensions of trunk sewers and water supplies are similarly credited with enabling suburban growth in previously undeveloped areas and with destruction of wildlife habitat.
From page 38...
... Political entities, for example, city or county, state, province, or nation, can serve as a convenient designation for an increasingly broad perspective, and for some aspects of infrastructure these entities have functional significance. For example, decisions about highway construction and electric power regulation are made largely at state levels, while water supplies and solid waste processing are primarily the concern of local governments.
From page 39...
... that can be discussed and measured with minimal reference to other aspects, for example, traffic congestion on a highway versus the stormwater runoff from that highway. In principle the links between each objective and one or more dimensions of effectiveness should be readily apparent and can be visualized as a graph such as that illustrated in Figure 2-1.
From page 40...
... For example, infrastructure is expected to provide its various services reliably for long periods of time, but there is always a chance that service will be interrupted. Interruptions sometimes occur due to structural failures, unusually high usage, required maintenance, or other causes, but a certain degree of redundancy and flexibility in the system can allow performance to remain satisfactory, at least when viewed on a broad scale.
From page 41...
... With water supply, for example, a community may have water that is basically healthful and meets requirements of Me Clean Water Act. Nevertheless, some people may not like the taste or for other reasons choose to purchase bottled water.
From page 42...
... At another level, the decisions concern design and operations details such as the reconstruction of street pavement or the scheduling of trash collections. Because infrastructure is intended at the higher level to support economic and social activity without adverse environmental consequences, performance ultimately has something to do with the outcomes from its use, for example, regional economic growth and quality of life.
From page 43...
... speed limit on all interstate highways, citing highway safety statistics and automobile energy consumption benefits as the basis for setting this standard. The uniform maximum speed limit proved unpopular and more difficult to enforce in some areas of the country than others.
From page 44...
... The committee agreed that the NCPWI's economic measures have much to do win assessing performance. In this committee's view, however, cost is a dimension of performance, but cost-effectiveness, economic efficiency analysis, and other methods such as multicriteria optimization and nondimensional scaling address tradeoffs among cost and other performance dimensions.
From page 45...
... These criteria could be among the factors influencing what a community judges to be "good" performance. 7These were termed performance "measures" in We NCPWI's report, as were the constituent items listed in Table 2-1 (NCPWI, 1988~.


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