Recent Posts by Werner Maritz

In early June of this year, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration announced an award of 432 grants totaling US$840 million to fund infrastructure projects at 381 airports around the country. This total includes funding for runway reconstruction and rehabilitation, construction of firefighting facilities, and the maintenance of taxiways, aprons, and terminals. This is only the first allotment of $3.18 billion in Airport Improvement Program (AIP) funding for airports across...

Don’t plan on airport construction slowing down anytime soon. Worldwide annual passenger traffic is projected to reach 10.7 billion by 2022, up from 4.3 billion in 2018. Seasonal peaks in air travel are increasing, too. And this is a global trend that is even more prominent in emerging economies, according to the airline trade association IATA. A flurry of global airport construction plans Almost US$750 billion in airport construction projects are underway or planned...

In part one of this article, I examined some of the many challenges public infrastructure projects face, spanning from poor planning to cost overruns, and even outright failure. In that article, I reviewed how industry professionals must vigilantly avoid three potential project pitfalls inherent in public infrastructure projects, including: selecting the wrong project, reputational damage, and financial failure. In this post, I’ll explore four additional public infrastructure...

Public infrastructure is the backbone of global economic activity, facilitating the delivery of an array of vital services including: education, health, sanitation, transport, communication, electricity, clean water, and many others. Unfortunately, infrastructure also faces an array of challenges, ranging from under-spending, poor planning, cost overruns and quality issues, to occasional project failure. Industry professionals can steer clear of this host of potential...

Today, more people live in urban areas than in rural ones. And according to recent predictions that gap will continue to grow, with more than two-thirds of the world’s population living in urban areas by 2050. This presents significant challenges to city planners, who historically have not designed infrastructure to cope with population density growth on this scale. As a result, many cities need to undertake infrastructure upgrades or replacements to prepare for the...

For the past few weeks the Oracle Construction and Engineering Global Business Unit has been focused on shedding some light on the challenges and opportunities in large infrastructure programs. Aside from the multiple efficiencies that can be gained through smarter, standardized digital management platforms and contract tools for example, there are working approaches and considerations that can ease these major program pressures. On December 13th, Oracle is hosting a webcast...

The global construction market is set to grow by US$8 trillion by 2030, reaching a total size of $US17.5 trillion. That is up by 85% and growing by an average annual rate of 3.9% to 2030 (Global Construction 2030). One of the areas fueling this growth is a global deficit in public infrastructure, due in part to population growth and the aging inventory of infrastructure assets, especially in developing regions. To close this infrastructure deficit, multilateral...

Informally, smart can be defined as “having or showing a quick-witted intelligence” and in the case of smart city initiatives, this intelligence is characterized by the capability for independent action. Smart builds respond and react to their environments - and importantly, must be able to evolve with it. Furthermore, although smart cities feature a high degree of automation, most systems are not yet at the stage where they can repair and maintain themselves without human...

All city planners, engineers and builders are under a tremendous amount of pressure, and those building smart cities are no different. Planning and preparation is vital – but once the work actually begins and you’re on-site, of course, things can change and plans must evolve. This creates a pressing need to record details and keep accounts of what has changed, or later audits could experience severe difficulties. This is more necessary than ever before when building a smart...