Tag Archives: samferdsel

Avbrudd – Forsyningskjedens mørke side

Revised on: 2015-09-27

Selv om kostnadsreduserende tiltak og outsourcing kan ha klare fordeler har det å gi slipp på kontrollen med forsyningskjeden sine utfordringer. Vi møtte forsker Jan Husdal i Møreforsking Molde som blant annet jobber med sårbarhetsanalyser og risikohåndtering i forsyningskjeder. Denne artikkelen er hentet fra Logistikk & Ledelse nummer 3/2009. Les hele artikkelen her.

For my English readers:
This is an interview with me in a Norwegian trade journal for Logistics Management.

Er rassikring lønnsomt?

Revised on: 2011-05-27

Rassikring av veger har en klar samfunnsøkonomisk nytteverdi, men hvor stor er den? De største gevinstene er knyttet til å unngå omkjøring, skape trygghet og redusere antall ulykker. Hvordan måler man dette i kroner? Spørsmålet er viktig og angår mange lokalsamfunn i dette fylket. Analyser viser at selve omkjøringskostnadene kan variere fra drøyt 200 kr/time og opp til 80.000 kr/time, avhengig av sted, trafikkmengde, trafikksammensetning og omkjøringsmuligheter.

(ved Svein Bråthen, Jan Husdal og Jens Rekdal, Høgskolen i Molde og Møreforsking Molde)

Denne kronikken stod på trykk i Romsdals Budstikke 24.11.2008 og det er gjort mindre justeringer i teksten for å tilpasse den til denne bloggen.

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Saving Norway’s crumbling infrastructure

Revised on: 2015-10-05

Following up my post this morning called “D-Day for Norway’s Transport Infrastructure“, the numbers are out now: The government intends to spend some 320,000,000 NOK ($45,000,000,000) on transport infrastructure over the next 10 years. Will it be enough? This reminds me of a post I had earlier, called “America’s crumbling infrastructure“, where the Minneapolis bridge collapse was a timely wake-up call for America to invest in its infrastructure. Will Norway be able to save its crumbling infrastructure without such a disaster?

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D-Day for Norway’s Transport Infrastructure

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

Today, on this ominous date, Friday the 13th, Norway’s government is presenting it’s development plans for the Norwegian transport infrastructure for 2010 to 2019 (Nasjonal Transportplan 2010-2019). Not that it will make much difference, because the way we do things here, instead of the national or regional government deciding where and what to build or not to build, Norway’s planning and decision process involves even the local governments, who essentially can veto (or at best significantly alter) any plans made the government or other higher authorities. Some call it madness , and I am inclined to agree.

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The curse of being oil-rich

Revised on: 2011-03-16

Ah…the complacency of being oil rich. So complacent, in fact, that we forget about our infrastructure. That’s the picture painted by the Norwegian newspaper aftenposten.no this morning, in their seemingly never-ending series of articles about the increasingly delapidated Norwegian road network. The reason for why things are the way they are: The literally well-oiled economy.

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Infrastructure – essential for competitiveness?

Revised on: 2015-09-26

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed my regular rants about the state of the Norwegian infrastructure, and roads in particular. Now, aftenposten.no reports that there is some support from the Global Competitiveness Report by the World Economic Forum. In overall infrastructure quality, Norway ranks 28/134, behind many other European countries, which is not too bad, but when it comes to road quality, Norway ranks 48/134, even behind countries such as Namibia (23/134), Tunisia (39/134) and Botswana (44/134). This is not good news.

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How to count money spent on road investments

Revised on: 2011-03-22

Following up yesterday’s post on why one of the world’s richest countries has one of the world’s worst road networks, today’s newspapers offer an interesting perspective: According to numbers prepared by Norway Statistics, Norway spent less money on road investments in 2007 than in 1995, that is, if you count in % of GDP. Is that a correct way of looking at it?

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The worst roads in the world’s richest country

Revised on: 2015-09-14

It is a perpetual topic with the Norwegian public, particularly in election years, like this year: We want better roads. And indeed, it is puzzling that a country ranked as one of the world’s biggest oil exporters, a country whose economy is strong, a country ranked by the UN and OECD as one of the best countries to live in, has such a poor road standard, compared to many other European countries. How come?

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Norwegian roads are slooooow…

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Revised on: 2011-03-22

In a previous post, a while I ago, I stated that Nowegian roads are dangerous…well, not only that, they are among the slowest in Europe, according to a newspaper article in Dagbladet. Comparing average speed on roads in 13 countries, it turns out that travelling in central Europe is several times much faster than in Norway.

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Sparse transportation networks – a nightmare

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Revised on: 2015-09-09

Now it has happened again. Hardly a week goes by in Norway without a major supply chain disruption. Now the main (and practically only) highway beween the Northern and Southern part of Norway has been interrupted, prompting long detours on smaller roads. Not only that, the in fact only rail line between Trondheim and Bodø has been interrupted as well, a rail line that transports much of the goods between North and South Norway and is a major freight corridor. Normally, eight large freight trains pass every day. The irony is that this happened during construction work aimed at improving said road. In fact, this is the second time this year; in June the road and rail were closed for 12 days. This time, it’s looking like a couple of WEEKS!

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Norwegian roads are dangerous!

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Revised on: 2015-09-10

I just learned from the news this evening, while writing on a rather dull post for this blog, that a rockfall has hit one of major roads in this region, Rv 70 in Sunndal. Rockfall is not an unknown event in Norway, especially not in this region, where roads undulate precariously along high mountains, and where the only “escape” is a dive into freezing cold waters. The road in question has a long history of rockfalls and the incident has cut off the most direct route between the coastal city of Kristiansund and Eastern Norway, but fortunately a detour route is available. In Norway’s sparse transportation network that is not always the case, and closed roads mean additional travel costs not only to the ordinary traveller (i.e. tourist), but most importantly to businesses, who then have no alternative for shipping their goods to their customers, or receiving their goods from their suppliers.

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Economies of scale

Revised on: 2011-03-22

In an article in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet today, some of Norways’s major construction businesses, Skanska, Veidekke and Mesta, lament the fact that infrastructure investments in Norway come in small pieces only, and not as large-scale projects, which could have given a bigger bang for the buck, or more kilometers for the kroner, to rephrase it into Norwegian terms.

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Cutting back on road spending may not be wise

Revised on: 2011-08-03

In an article today, the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet revealed that Statens Vegvesen (or the Norwegian Public Road Administration in English), which oversees the planning, construction and operation of the national and county road networks, is going to make major cuts to their budget, thus halting or severely delaying major infrastructure projects.

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Impact assessment of road transportation projects

Revised on: 2015-09-09

The idea of an impact assessment, often also referred to as cost-benefit analysis, is to assess all impacts of a certain project, positive or negative, monetized and non-monetized. The Norwegian Public Roads Administration (NPRA) has the responsibility for building and maintaining all regional public roads in Norway, and has developed a method for impact assessment that is outlined in Impact Assessment in Norway.

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Reliability and vulnerability in road development projects

Revised on: 2011-03-17

Few will question that the sender, the recipient, the freight hauler or society in general, experience additional costs when goods or persons cannot reach their destinations in time or space. Consequently, it should be obvious that a reliable transportation network represents a benefit to society. Equally, a vulnerable network would represent a net cost to society. Why then, is the reliability, or conversely, the vulnerability, of the transportation network not a matter of evaluation in traditional cost-benefit analyses?

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Pålitelighet og sårbarhet – et ikke-tema i nyttekostnadsanalyser?

Revised on: 2015-09-09

Pålitelighet og sårbarhet er to forhold av betydning for transportbrukere som i dag ikke tas hensyn til i vurdering av samferdselsprosjekter. Få vil være i tvil om at både avsender, mottaker, transportør og samfunnet generelt påføres til dels betydelige tilleggskostnader når varer eller personer ikke kommer frem dit de skal når de skal. At et pålitelig vegnett representerer en nytteverdi er derfor innlysende. Hvorfor er slike vurderinger ikke med når vegprosjekter blir vurdert?

Dette er den norske originalversjonen av Why reliability and vulnerability should be an issue in road development projects. Denne artikkelen stod på trykk i Samferdsel, nr. 3/2004 (pdf).

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Pålitelighet og sårbarhet av transportsystemer

Revised on: 2011-05-18

Transportsystemer som veg og jernbane danner ryggraden i et moderne samfunn. Påliteligheten og sårbarheten i et transportsystem blir dermed avgjørende faktorer ikke bare i konkurranse- og markedsøyemed, men også i beredskapssammenheng, for å kunne opprettholde normal samfunnsdrift. Dette er den norske oversettelsen/tilpasningen av The reliability and vulnerability of transportation lifelines, skrevet av Jan Husdal ved University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA, i 2002. Videreutviklet i 2008: Er rassikring lønnsomt?

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