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Have you heard of the Dutch town of Spijkenisse? It was once known for building the fake bridges featured on Euro banknotes—an interesting enough distinction, perhaps, but hardly the stuff of international headlines. 

In November 2020, however, Spijkenisse found itself in the news for something rather more dramatic: a metro train crashed through a barrier and was caught, ten metres in the air, by a whale tail sculpture. The driver walked away uninjured. 

What's particularly interesting here is the question of purpose. This sculpture had been commissioned for one reason only: aesthetics. The residents faced the brutalist end of a train bridge, and the sculpture was meant as compensation to beautify the area. 

No one, not the town planners, nor the designers, nor the engineers would have considered safety as a design requirement for this sculpture. But in this case, the sculpture delivered a value of safety. 

This is, admittedly, an extreme example of how value is often invisible. But it should prompt us to consider how our infrastructure assets often provide value that don't appear on balance sheets. In other words, we are recording every possible data point on our assets (condition, dimensions, maintenance strategy etc.) in our asset management tools, but are we also recording why an asset was put in there in the first place? 

Next time we are making investment decisions, we could look beyond the traditional metrics of condition, performance, costs, and risk; instead, we might ask ourselves: what purpose, what value, what service is this asset actually providing? 

A street light isn't just a physical light bulb on a physical pole... 

The same physical asset can provide peace of mind in a high-crime area or it could provide prosperity in public spaces near business and tourism hotspots. 

The way we currently make capital plans is rather asset-centric, it focuses on the physical object (e.g. roads program, parks program, facilities program), and it leads, naturally, to very constrained view, i.e., how do I reduce the budget rather than how do I get more value. 

To implement this value-based approach, start asking yourself these questions: 

1. What value does this asset actually provide to the community? (And go beyond the obvious answer!)
2. How does the value provided align with our strategy and the community's priorities?
3. Can we measure and track these outcomes?
4. Are there alternative solutions (even non-asset solutions) that might deliver the same value more effectively? 

If we are to truly deliver value via our assets, we must first unveil what value the assets provide, make our decisions against value, and ultimately track our performance based on the value we deliver. 

The true value of infrastructure often lies beneath the surface – in the safety, comfort, opportunities, and experiences it creates rather than in the physical assets themselves. The whale tail sculpture in Spijkenisse reminds us that sometimes the greatest value comes from unexpected places. When we broaden our understanding of what constitutes "value," we can make more holistic decisions that truly serve our communities' needs. 

Stay tuned for our next blog in this series, where we'll travel to Japan in the 1960s, and explore the relationship between value and time.