Consulting and Advisory Services to the Transportation and Infrastructure Sectors

Ports

Airports

Rail

Roads and Highways

Environmental Planning

Organizational Strategies

“All life is problem solving” ¹

Transportation Associates focusses on providing consultancy services, independent advice and solving problems for customers in the transportation and infrastructure sectors.

To be able to strategize successfully about infrastructure and solve problems associated with it, requires knowledge of how that infrastructure is to be engineered, the value it can deliver and the likely beneficial and adverse impacts that such infrastructure might have and how these can be ameliorated. That means bringing to bear on the problem, diverse, real world experience gained from transportation and infrastructure projects across their evaluation, planning, detailed design, delivery and operational phases.

“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.” ²

Decision makers need to weigh all of the options – poor decisions always come from limited analysis and transportation and infrastructure is too big, too expensive to make poor decisions about. To find the right solution often means dispassionately working through a lot of wrong ones.

Transportation Associates adopts a holistic approach to problem solving and advising on transportation and infrastructure bringing career long experience in civil engineering, environmental assessment and project economics to bear on client’s problems, need for information and generation of potential solutions.

By being independent itself, Transportation Associates can give advice that is independent from other agendas and can adopt a strictly evidence based approach. Transportation Associates does not undertake the detailed design and engineering of projects. Accordingly, it is not driven, as are many large so called “one stop shop“ consulting firms, by “pull through” - that is providing advisory services to customers in order to try to lock onto the later, bigger contracts for detailed engineering design and documentation.

“If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories. In this way it is only too easy to obtain what appears to be overwhelming evidence in favour of a theory which, if approached critically, would have been refuted”. ³

And even if they have the best of intentions, “one stop shops” firms do not necessarily have the very best people for every part of the task. Many of the very best and talented professionals prefer to work independently of big companies for themselves or in small specialised firms because they value their ability to give such dispassionate advice – even where such advice has to be not necessarily what the customer expected.

Transportation Associates has had career long experience of building and leading teams of such very clever people and giving them the leadership “umbrella” to help them deliver their expertise in order to create holistic solutions for the benefit of customers.

Transportation Associates does not make decisions for clients but it does provide the evidence, the options, and the assessments which help the right solution to shine through and stand out above the remainder of the options so clients can make the right decision.

¹ Sir Karl Raimund Popper CH FBA FRS (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994)
² Karl Popper Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (1972)
³ Karl Popper The Poverty of Historicism (1957) Ch. 29 The Unity of Method