۱٫ Public sector infrastructure

Lifecycle management of infrastructure is essential for all public sector assets. Public sector infrastructure is broadly defined to include capital assets affecting water, sanitation, environmental protection, education, and transportation. Emphasis should be placed on ensuring that public capital assets are safeguarded and maintained to achieve their effective and efficient economic and social contribution. Underinvestment in transportation infrastructure maintenance illustrates the failure to provide lifecycle management and forgo the full value of these assets.

۲٫ Transportation infrastructure

Ongoing investment and innovation raises national competitiveness and enhances living standards. The quality of existing transportation infrastructure is viewed as a criticalfoundation for productive investment. Governments around the world are demonstrating a renewed focus on fiscal stimulus via transportation infrastructure investments (PwC, 2017). Yet, transport systems can quickly lose value ifnotmaintained.Maintenanceexpendituresprovide for the repair and safe operation of existing roads, bridges, waterways, and transit systems. Neglecting maintenance leads to lower productivity. In the short term, poorly maintained transportation infrastructure imposes costs (e.g., delays, damaged vehicles, greater packaging requirements) on users. Over the long term, deficient maintenance markedly increases the cost of disposal and reconstruction (Wessel & Olson, 2017). In addition, the environmental impact of deficient transportation infrastructure, although underresearched, is thought to be significant. Lifecycle asset management has been used by the private sector to manage assets with long, useful lives, but government agencies have not readily adopted this approach. This has led to inadequate repair and maintenance of infrastructure, particularly transportation infrastructure, in the U.S. and in many other countries. According to a U.S. Department of Transportation (2015) report, U.S.roads and bridges faced a capital investment backlog of $836 billion in 2015. Although there have been attempts to get government agencies to better manage the maintenance of infrastructure, these efforts have mostly failed. In this article, we describe several levers to impose asset management discipline on the diverse agencies managing our transportation infrastructure. Before we describe the levers, it is important to explain prior attempts to bring lifecycle asset management into the public sector and analyze why it has not been widely implemented.