ABSTRACT
A complementary and potentially more cost-effective approach is to improve the utilisation, efficiency and longevity of the built and existing infrastructure projects. Many governments in both developed and developing countries neglect their existing assets, and current operations and maintenance practices are often seriously deficient. In operations, they fail to maximise asset utilisation and to meet adequate user quality standards while incurring needlessly high costs as well as environmental and social externalities. Maintenance is all too often neglected since political bias is towards funding new assets. Similarly, resilience to natural disasters tends to be ignored, although such hazards are becoming more common and more destructive because of climate change. As a result of the maintenance backlog and the lack of resilience measures, existing assets deteriorate much faster than necessary, shortening their useful life. It is worth noting that satisfactory lifetime performance of transport infrastructure is critically important to sustained economic growth and social development in both developed and developing economies.
