I don't think it is common to measure a vehicles useful life in kilometres. I know that many Councils have policies about when a vehicle is traded in that are tied to kilometres, but this isn't necessarily the same as useful life.

At Bundaberg I believe we adopt a range of useful lives for vehicles depending on the make and model and a number of other considerations, including resale value etc.

I also understand that our fleet guys sometimes use the following site when trying to determine useful lives, etc.

http://www.redbook.com.au

As of 31 August, the site has been visited on a total of 38,689 occasions and 165,320 pages have been viewed.
The site was visited almost 6,000 times in the last month, which is by far the most visits in a single month in the history of the site.

Another 95 pages were added to the site in August, bringing the grand total to 3,016

This is my first post!

Does anyone know if there is a standard or benchmark for estimated the expected useful life of a motor vehicle in kilometres.

I need to calculate the remaining life of a second hand vehicle and was hoping to use the odometer reading.

Any ideas?

• Bundaberg Regional Council
• Canning City Council
• Mildura Rural City Council
• Waverley Council
• Earthco Projects Pty Ltd

We have commenced a new study for local councils – we are looking into utilization of Business Intelligence (BI) technologies. The requirement for open government puts additional pressure on local councils to re-evaluate and improve their BI capabilities. However, the deployment and adoption of BI is particularly challenging for local councils as their needs and objectives differ markedly from those of traditional users of BI technologies. This first of its kind study will provide comparative peer data based on actual experiences of local councils with different BI solutions (internally developed spreadsheets vs BI built into ERP vs enterprise BI) and will enable local councils to better evaluate their options and strategies. If you wish to participate, please e-mail to service(at)tech-indicators.com.au or visit our website for more details -> http://www.tech-indicators.com.au/studies. Leila Abbasova, Technology Indicators

It requires that condition surveys of a reasonable sized sample of assets has been conducted on two occasions.

I have explained the methodology using dummy data here
http://brc-amps.wikidot.com/road-pavement-useful-life

But I would like to try it out on some real data.

If anybody would be willing to provide me with some real data, I would only be to pleased to run the analysis on it too see what I come up with.

Anyone interested?

I think I interpreted Chris' question a bit differently to you. I thought he was asking about publishing the advice of professional solicitors, not about giving out Adhoc legal advice.
Perhaps we need a legal opinion on if it is OK to share legal opinions?!

Perhaps case studies here might be appropriate BUT NOT advice. But even this would require heavy disclaimers.

Most of our current advice here is from engineers and practitioners to engineers on a "use as appropriate" professionally acceptable basis (so disclaimer not necessary as it is implied).
DP

Welcome to the site and the forum.

It isn't really my field, but I suspect that publishing legal advice is probably OK providing their are no privacy issues associated with it.
I know that LGAQ circulates legal opinions from time to time, and publish them on their website in the members area.

I have given a link to the most recent one below, although you won't be able to view it unless you can log in to LGOnline.
http://www.lgaq.asn.au/group/guest/home/-/journal_content/56/10136/7BFB77B2C5312C9B81178258B6AE5DBE

I might try contacting them (LGAQ) tomorrow to get their take on the issue.

Surely there must be a few good photos of corrugations or rutting sitting on a few hard drives somewhere?

Visit [http://www.michaelsampson.net] and have a look at "User Adoption Strategies".

Lots of good information and things you might need to consider in rolling out, say an asset management system to end users.

Darron Passlow

Also I am happy to help with the content and editorial of the next newsletter (if available).
I suggest my recent postings elsewhere on Government Innovation and "Open Source" discussions in the USA with applying Google apps across Government might be good relevant topics for next letter.
Let's set up a newsletter topics heading at LGAM where members and others can suggest topics they might like covered. This is user engagement and what we are all about.

DP

I think you are correct about "we" being better than "I".

Whilst I passionately believe that the site is a very good thing for Local Government, I worry about the updates being considered to be SPAM. I thought putting my name and contact details on the e-mails and not hiding behind the site so to speak was the way to go. I actually would feel more more comfortable sending updates to Councils if I could sign them - "The Team at the Local Government & Municipal Knowledge Base".

What I/we should do is try and get an editorial team together for the next newsletter, and then set up a special e-mail address for it.
Any volunteers?

Some comments;
1 I would not use 1st person in a newsletter like this. e.g.
Instead of "I hope .." use "It is hoped …"
Often "we" (showing more than one) is more inclusive and less personal than "I".
2 I would suggest all current members be asked to get this newsletter (in appropriate format) to not only their CEO but also their executive team. Another way to get it (with credibility) to the right people.
Regards DP

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• PDF Document
• Word Document
• Open Document

I think the first step is for LG people who are already making good use of Open Source products, to tell their counterparts in other Councils what they have been doing, and how it has made their lives easier. If you or anyone else reading this has any influence with the LGAQ or their counterparts elsewhere, by all means see if they will promote the idea for us. Any top down support for the concept would be great.

By a simple n point visual inspection system or by generating an overall pavement condition score, from defect severity and extent data?

If you are generating an overall condition score, what defect data are you using, and how are you quantifying it?

• Roughness ?
• Cracking ?
• Rutting ?
• Patched area ?
• Stripping ?
• Potholes ?

And what formula are you using to get from the raw data to an overall condition score/index?

I and others are definately supportive of this idea. But, how to take it further, as IT departments in Councils (I have worked with 3 Council's now) are very reluctant to any changes to their Standard Operating System (SOE).
Most of the Councils' might have similar OS and other utilities (but they want to test everything, if at all they agree to investigate after business cases and lots of arguments). They might not want to adopt from IT departments from other Councils.

Just for example, we will be trialing ADAC, there is much resistance from IT than anyone else. This is shared cost model (not free) but, still difficult to take them along. They wanted near risk-free, day to day operations.

Hmm…..Not innovative, let alone supportive of any trial of such free tools available. Remember, I had to take approvals to have write access to LGAM.info in first instance.

How can we take it further? How can we promote it? (Councillor workshops, LGAQ level?)

As of 30 June, the site has been visited on a total of 29,008 occasions and 138,113 pages have been viewed.

Another 146 pages were added to the site in June, bring the grand total to 2,279

If you have 5 minutes to spare, and you would be willing to participate, it would be greatly appreciated.

I guess there are three possibilities:
a) You average the condition score
b) You subdivide the road segment
c) You have business rules that prohibit the resurfacing of part of a road segment.

All three options have their pros & cons. In the end, I guess it is a judgement call. It would be nice to limit the need for re-segmentation, but in some cases that is the only option.

Perhaps the answer is a rule saying, "average the condition score, unless you believe that a subsection of the road will require renewal prior to the next scheduled condition inspection."

In any event the 10 or 11 point system gives you more flexibility.

Interested in your thoughts

Regards

Bruce J

The first five buttons are particularly useful, and I probably should take the time to discuss them all individually at some stage, but I thought it might be cool to discuss the "discuss" button first.

The whole purpose of the site is help Councils to share information, and starting or participating in a discussion about a given topic is probably the easiest way for someone to get started.

If you have a question about the content of a page or you would like to make a comment about it, simply click on the discuss button and type away. It's that easy.

The number in brackets indicates the number of comments made so far.

If you want to see what topics are currently being discussed, click on "Recent posts" in the side menu.

If you are up for a discussion, but don't want to do so here - thats cool too. The Mailing List page contains a nice list of Local Governnment realted discussion groups not affiliated with this site. If you haven't got time to look through them all, my suggestion is to try the Google Wave first.

In the case of a 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 system. This might translate to condition 4 at one end and condition 6 at the other, which would result in an overall condition score of 5 for the segment.

1. The "Commercial Carpet Life Expectancy" article linked to at the bottom of the page mentions that (a) vendors tend to quote carpet lives of 20-40 years and (b) in the real world lives of 6-9 years is more likely and (c) carpets can start to appear quite old and unattractive in just 3 to 5 years.
2. I have had a chat to the Manager Building Projects at BRC & his thoughts are that carpets typically last for 15-20 years.
3. When BRC last had it buildings revalued, the valuers suggested a life of 15 years for carpets.
4. The carpet in my office is 13 years old (photo in main article) and is still in pretty reasonable condition.
5. I know from personal experience that young kids can pretty much destroy a carpet in a very short period of time - glue spills for example aren't very carpet friendly!

The news items have been a mixture of site updates, event announcements, news of general interest, and that sort of thing. I have tried to make the news items mostly factual, but a bit of personal opinion probably creeps in every now and then.

I have thought about adding a blog to the site from time to time, but never quite gotten around to it until now. The Wikidot site developers publish a regular blog, and I have found that to be quite interesting, so I thought an "LGAM Blog" might be worth a try.

The main reason I set up this site, was to try and encourage Local Councils to share information with each other a bit more freely, and I am going to try and use the blog to further this aim. I am also going to use it to try and fire up discussions about items of interest that aren't really news.

Anyway from now on expect a bit of personal opinion here and just the facts below.

P.S. I'm Looking forward to heaps of comments and hints about how to make the blog and the site better.

As of 31 May, 17,372 different people have visited the site on a total of 25,911 occasions and viewed 129,579 pages.

As the Google Analytics graph below shows, the number of people visiting the site has increased considerably over the past few months.

https://wave.google.com/wave/waveref/googlewave.com/w+Gi9YtAY2A

Perhaps we can link up thru this account at an appropriate time when I am not in office. I can send you details of my availability under separate cover.

Darron

If interested, contact www.tech-indicators.com.au

The website's address is: http://training.ce.washington.edu/PGI/

Happy Googling

I'd be interested to hear if others think this method would generate a reasonable unit rate for culvert sizes for which no local cost data is available?

As of 30 April, 14,405 different people have visited on a total of 22,344 occasions and viewed 119,260 pages.

As the graph below shows, the number of people visiting the site has increased considerably over the last couple of months.

If anyone is interested the address is - http://aucelg.ning.com/

As of 31 March, 11,705 different people have visited on a total of 19,289 occasions and viewed 112,377 pages. More people visited the site in March (2,225) than in any previous month in the site's history. There were quite a lot of visits from outside Australia including a large number from Sacramento in the USA. (Hello to anyone from Sacramento reading this news update)

There have now been visits to the site from 138 different countries. The ten countries generating the most visits are:

1. Australia (14,296)
2. United States (1,673)
3. United Kingdom (557)
4. New Zealand (517)
5. Canada (348)
6. South Africa (246)
7. India (194)
8. Malaysia (108)
9. Brazil (69)
10. France (64)

• Bass Coast Shire Council
• Bundaberg Regional Council
• Casey City Council
• Cassowary Coast Regional Council
• Ipswich City Council
• Lake Macquarie City Council
• Mackay Regional Council

They are also being aggregated on state based news pages, e.g.

• NSW Council News
• Queensland Council News
• Victorian Council News

If your council is publishing news by RSS, please let us know, by leaving a comment below.

The site now contains 2400+ pages of information, and as of 28 February, 9,589 different people have visited on a total of 16,701 occasions and viewed 104,604 pages.

As the graph below indicates, the number of unique visitors each week has been growing steadily since Christmas, and last week 300+ people visited the site.

There are a few new site features planned in the near future so stay tuned.

The site now contains 2333 pages of information, and as of 31 January, 8,626 different people have visited the site on a total of 15,244 occasions and viewed 98,284 pages.

A new link (Photo Library) has been added to the side menu, and a dozen or so images of typical council assets have been uploaded to the site.

Balance Tank - Is a reservoir in which the water level will vary to faciltiate balancing of water. The balancing of water is required to allow for diurnal variance. Examples: Keep water turning over in the reservior or to allow for continuity of operations at a treatment plant by allowing sufficient balancing volume in the balance tank for operations during low consumption.

Service Reservoir - Is a reservoir that maintains a full level of treated water at all times. The water level will only vary over a small range due to pumping control levels. The function is maximium reservoir storage.

I'm not 100% sure. We (Bundaberg) used distinguish between Reservoirs and Balance Tanks, but about 2 years ago we did a review of our Water & Wastewater asset names we renamed the balance tanks reservoirs.

The article below (which also mentions service reservoirs) …

http://nptel.iitm.ac.in/courses/Webcourse-contents/IIT-KANPUR/wasteWater/Lecture%2014.htm

… defines a Balancing Storage as the quantity of water required to be stored in the reservoir for equalising or balancing fluctuating demand against constant supply is known as the balancing storage (or equalising or operating storage).

So perhaps a balance tank is a reservoir used primarily to house a balancing storage?

In any case I will have a word with someone at work tomorrow who is a bit more expert in the field and see if I can get them to add an article and an authoritative definition.