Willem de Wit 
A pessimist is an optimist with experience. Today, there is no shortage of experiences that feed pessimism: There is too little money for infrastructure maintenance; Delaying essential maintenance increases future renewal costs by 1 to 2% each year; The Netherlands football team cannot win a match on penalties. Two prominent provincial executives are sounding the …
A Rijkswaterstaat employee is sailing under a bridge in his spare time when he gets the fright of his life: parts of the bridge suddenly fall down. He raises the alarm, and the bridge undergoes emergency repairs. On another bridge, a motorcyclist narrowly avoids disaster when he manages to dodge a hole in the road …
A recent article in Cobouw carried the headline: Alarming funding shortage for maintaining infrastructure. The Dutch Court of Audit points to a €34.5 billion gap in the national government’s draft budget. In the budget debates, the only remedy found was a reshuffling of funds. If the shortage means renovations are postponed, domino effects begin to …
The NATO Summit in The Hague marks a new reality for the infrastructure sector. While municipalities, provinces and Rijkswaterstaat (the Dutch equivalent of National Highways) are deeply engaged in renovating post-war infrastructure, a second, urgent task has emerged: preparing for the possibility of a large-scale military crisis. At the summit, NATO decided to increase defence …
Europe, in a world where hard power rules, must quickly shift from soft power to smart power to maintain its standard of living and, above all, its security. Since the USA became the dominant force in the world after WWII, Europe has suited itself in the role of soft power. Soft power is the power …
I hope you have found peace and lightness around Christmas and New Year’s Eve with your family, your friends and also within yourself. I myself have found time to read about topics that interest and concern me: innovation and Europe. Thus, I took out Ilja Pfeijfer’s novel Grand Hotel Europa again. The main character stays …
2024 is almost in the rearview mirror. Despite road closures on the A2, A7 and A10 motorways, the threshold to 2025 is in sight. We are going to experience road closures more often in the coming years. Many of the bridges, viaducts and locks built during the post-WW II reconstruction period are reaching the end …
Television and newspapers regularly report on the need to renew infrastructure. The many bridges, viaducts, locks and tunnels built in the reconstruction years after WWII are reaching the end of their lifespans. This leads to a wave of renovation and replacement projects. The people in charge are preparing to get all that work done. The …
With John van der Steur. We’re enjoying an amazing European sports summer. The Spanish national team dazzled everyone and became the first to win the European Football Championship for the fourth time. During the Paris Olympics, we’ve seen heroic performances from athletes from every country and in every discipline. After the Olympics is before the …
The Mobilé 4 flow & innovation team is very busy with projects. Together with our clients, we accelerate the flow of work in project organisations. Our target is 20%. On our WHY page, our clients tell to what extent we are achieving this: https://mobile4flow.com/. Despite these fantastic results, convincing people of our expertise is not …