The man in the street is hardly aware of the myriad of infrastructures underneath his feet: sewers, electricity cables, gas pipes, water pipes, fuel pipes… What is more worrisome is that the people in charge of these systems are equally oblivious. The infrastructures are owned and managed by many different parties, which don’t always communicate well with each other. The result is chaos. Accidents – such as an excavator hitting a gas pipe – do happen and there are currently no good strategies to prevent this.
“No-one knows exactly where pipes and cables are located, and who owns them,” says PhD researcher Peter Spaans. “Even their owners are not always up-to-speed on their location and their state. There are initiatives to compile all this information in a central register, but the problem is that corporate information is often treated as confidential, and much information is lacking altogether.”
Spaans is aiming to create some order in this chaos by analysing the structure of the underground market. Which actors play a role? Which interests do they have? How do they interact and what is the degree of transparency? Is there any potential for cooperation? “The aim is not just to prevent accidents,” Spaans points out, “but also to make the market more efficient. If one company opens up a street to replace a sewer, and another company needs to repair a gas pipe in that same street, they might as well cooperate and use the same time window. If they don’t, the street has to be opened up twice.”
Spaans’ main focus is on reducing transaction costs in the broadest sense. “These include not only the actual costs of infrastructure maintenance, such as digging costs,” Spaans explains, “but also costs associated with assessing the situation, loss of time and income, holding meetings, involving lawyers… My aim is to analyse how efficient this system is, where problems occur, and how to prevent them.”
Eventually he hopes to incorporate his findings into a governance model that will make the underground market more efficient, safer, and more sustainable. “In the end it is not just companies that will benefit from this, but society at large.”
