Putting less emphasis on engineering

From David Zetland and The End of Abundance: Economic Solutions to Water Scarcity.

I think Zetland makes several good points.  Especially the issue of engineers being more cost conscious than value conscious.  Benefits are much harder to quantify than costs - - incorporating societal value propositions into the cost-benefit matrix is very difficult.

"The typical water manager is a civil engineer who has worked in the industry since leaving university.  He (usually a man) has risen through the ranks, learning how to work with colleagues, political supervisors and others in an organization where the division of labor and hierarchy becomes more formal as the number of employees increases.  These managers use accountants to balance the books and lawyers to handle legal obligations, but their primary job is supplying water their communities need using infrastructure that stores, treats and distributes fresh and wastewater.

In the past of abundant water supply, problems were solved with pipes and pumps, but scarcity has changed matters.  Now pipes compete for the same water, and water management puts less emphasis on engineering.

Engineers, lawyers and economists approach problems in different ways.  Say that a city faces water shortages while nearby farmers flood their fields to grow low value crops.  An engineer may tell people to use less or drill a well into the aquifer farmers use.  A lawyer may cite a law that gives urban areas priority access to water in shortage or use political power to change the relative seniority's of urban and agricultural water.  Economists might suggest raising the price of urban water so that people use less (cut demand) or buying water from farmers (increase supply).  These differences originate in the tools of each trade.

Engineers are more cost conscious that vale conscious; more oriented to supply than demand; and more familiar with hard infrastructure constraints than soft human choices.  When they raise prices, they do not consider different users' opinions on scarcity, future actions or values.  Lawyers specialize in negotiating and resolving conflict, threading a path between people with rights, contracts and power to a negotiated solution that parties will accept, even if they grumble.

Economists also favor a particular set of tools, but the problem of shortage is central to economics.  When fixed supply is less than demand, prices rise until quantity demanded falls and shortage ends.  Prices are easier to use then limits on customer choices, subsidies for low-flow toilets, reservoir expansion, or taking farmers' water.  Prices rise with scarcity and fall with abundance, reliably matching supply and demand.  Local conditions determine the exact means of shaking thirst, but the underlying mechanism of adjusting prices has worked for millennia."

Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor

Look at the timeline and project history for this high speed rail project.  Developing transportation projects like this (and this project is within an existing rail corridor) has become a generational effort.  In a world marked by shrinking time horizons and ever-faster performance criteria, the one exception is the big public infrastructure project.  This is a good example of how capitalistic energy and democratic liberalism get wasted in the balance over a 40-year period.

Projects have a beginning and an ending, and in between lies their story.  This one has a really long story.

The Steel Wheel Interstate

This is a great article - - high-speed rail gets the attention, but freight improvements are more important (at least in the the short-term).

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2009/0901.longman.html

Global Warming Illustrated

PPPs in India

Interesting information in this article, PPPs for roads, a costly affair.  The world of transportation PPPs in the context of India.  This observation in the article could apply anywhere:

"With the accumulation of experience and development of robust project methods, one would expect a decrease in overruns over time. While this was found to be true in the case of time overruns, there was no evidence that cost overruns have significantly changed over time. This indicates two things. First, there seems to be an inherent bias in the procurement methods which makes such cost overruns beneficial to contractors and other parties involved. Second, project management tools and techniques need further development."

Moving back to Africa

Goldman Sachs recently issued a report on opportunities in Africa - - Africa's Turn.

Maybe the next China.

Private Water in Italy

From - - The Nation, Direct Democracy in Italy:

"Meanwhile, experience in Italy with some rapacious private water companies—which took profits while making no investments in a system of pipelines so decrepit that nearly 50 percent of pumped water can go to waste—had persuaded most Italians that privatization was a mistake. But the issue went even deeper. Referendum number two stated that investors in the water system would not be guaranteed any profit. There was no way the message could be clearer: Italians no longer accept the Thatcherite view that all things are better managed by the private sector. There is such a thing as society—and some resources belong to us all."