The road to America’s infrastructure overhaul is paved in technology
When it comes to infrastructure construction and maintenance, the road we took to get here will not lead us where we need to go tomorrow. An influx of government funding including the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and various coronavirus recovery programs provides a generational opportunity to invest in roads, bridges, airports and other infrastructure assets. It also creates a generational challenge for the city, county and state governments tasked with turning America’s infrastructure dreams into reality.
According to McKinsey, construction projects typically run up to 80 percent over budget and take 20 percent longer than scheduled to finish. For big projects, such as highways, airports and railways, this can add up to billions of dollars and decades of delays. Even on smaller projects, every day and taxpayer dollar counts. Layer on the unprecedented level of coordination and reporting required to take advantage of federal infrastructure funding, and government entities of all sizes are staggering under the weight of finding a way to take advantage of this golden opportunity while also meeting all the requirements that come with it.
The answer lies in one word: technology. The public sector will need to rely on modern technology to build a more modern nation. Digital construction technologies have been proven to help city, county and state governments save both time and money—shaving weeks or sometimes months off of project timelines and digitizing processes that enable them to do more while managing through labor shortages.
This means ditching paper construction plans in lieu of digital designs and adopting innovations that include operator-assisted machine control on jobsites, and analytics-driven project and asset management software that will enable infrastructure owners and their partners to make better-informed decisions for decades to come.
Lifting the burden of reporting
One significant challenge that cities, states and counties are facing is the cascade of government agencies that have a role in allocating funds for infrastructure projects—and therefore, expect a high level of transparency and reporting on how those funds are spent. In many cases, funds for a single project can come from multiple sources, all of which entail specific requirements. Cities and counties are often not accustomed to this level of reporting complexity and, in general, are not equipped to provide such sophisticated tracking and reporting.
Fortunately, today’s project management solutions have the capabilities to manage even the smallest capital improvement programs, keep track of operations and maintenance costs, track funding sources, and report up to state, federal and other government agencies. City, county and state governments that expect to receive federal infrastructure funding but still use spreadsheets to track projects and costs should look now for a more modern and feature-rich project management solution that also streamlines reporting.
Crossing the digital design divide
Just as spreadsheets won’t get today’s job done, neither will paper-based project plans. Digital construction design and delivery is the way of the future—and when it comes to spending federal infrastructure dollars, the future is now.
Digital as-builts, which are data-rich 3-D models of a road, bridge, port, railway or any other infrastructure asset, allow everyone across the project to work off the same model, in real time. This includes engineers, architects, contractors, and the city, county and state government project owners who stand to benefit the most by having an accurate 3-D representation of the finished project.
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