€34.5 billion shortage for infrastructure maintenance
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 fall, each one making the next harder to stop.
For public leaders, this is not just a technical issue but a governance issue: safety, continuity, and accountability all begin to drift.
This story touches Rijkswaterstaat, yes, but also every other infrastructure manager trying to spend public money with care.
Domino-effect-1: when replacement and renovation are postponed.
- A bow wave of renovation work rolls ahead of us.
- Bridges, viaducts, and tunnels deteriorate further, making repair more expensive.
- Deferred maintenance creates dangerous situations—like the Haringvliet Bridge or the A7 near Purmerend. Emergency repairs leap forward in line; other projects fall back.
- And with that come multitasking, ad-hoc meetings, crisis calls, restarts… all the small erosions that, together, drain productivity.
These effects are not merely operational. They touch program control, prioritization, and budgeting. They become strategic.
Throwing money at the problem
Do we fall back on the instinct to pour in more budget? Or is there a better way to prevent delay in the first place?
Our root-cause analyses show that project organizations can often work smarter: less replanning, fewer failure costs, less stress.
Domino-effect-2: inside project execution
Domino effects appear here too. Not because teams lack goodwill, but because the system they work inside pushes them into counterproductive behavior.
It starts with Assumption 1: starting early means finishing early. Sensible enough—about as sensible as saying, “if I pedal harder, I’ll eventually bicycle my way to New York.”
Starting too early creates coordination problems. Coordination problems create delays. Delays create replanning. Replanning creates blurred priorities. And then everyone sails their own course.
When every party makes its own plan, uniform priorities disappear by definition.
Under time pressure, the pattern accelerates:
- too many activities opened at once,
- teams crowding each other physically and organizationally,
- idle moments filled with still more work, because of Assumption 2: everyone must be 100% utilized.
Things worsen when parties begin managing their own “pocket time” and hiding risks. Problems surface only when delays can no longer be absorbed.
You see this pattern in large, troubled projects, where everything stays quiet until the end, when the delays finally come crashing into view.
In many projects, the problem shows up as high failure costs.
The FLOW method teaches that the two assumptions—start as early as possible, and keep everyone fully loaded—are themselves part of the delay.
We see contractors who have re-examined those assumptions reduce their failure costs in measurable ways.
Throwing money at the problem vs. FLOW solutions
The good news: throwing money at the problem isn’t necessary. In fact, it usually makes things worse.
Our root-cause analyses point toward solutions that cut the domino effects off at the source.
With smarter management, the same people can deliver the same projects with fewer risks and lower failure costs.
Three examples:
- Transparent end buffers, where all hidden “pocket buffers” are gathered into one collective buffer that any party may use when delays occur.
- Buffers at integration points, preventing one late activity from dragging the entire project with it.
- Singular focus, where everyone knows exactly what has priority—and just as important, what must not be worked on.
Many assume buffers make projects longer. In reality, the aggregated buffers are far smaller than the total of the hidden ones. Projects become shorter—something we also see in practice.
These are just a few instruments from the FLOW toolbox. Organizations that adopt them see their projects begin to move again. And people regain the feeling that they are in control, instead of being overtaken by their own planning.
Work harder, or manage smarter?
Cutting budgets for replacement and renovation only deepens the problems. And brute force—more people, more meetings, more pressure—doesn’t help either. If that worked, the sector would have discovered it long ago.
The solution is smarter management.
Organizations like ABB e-Mobility, Total Energies, HIL GmbH, and the Province of Zeeland are already using these techniques and seeing clear improvements.
Their experiences are on our website: https://mobile4flow.com.
Our Mobilé 4 Flow & Innovation team is part of an international community of purpose and practice. REALIZATION is part of this community as well; they’ve used FLOW for years. Their CEO, Sanjeev Gupta, explains the approach with clarity. Listen to him. Their case studies speak plainly, too.
On LinkedIn, you can find a report of a FLOW simulation we ran for the Province of Zeeland.
Building the bridge together
If any of this resonates with you, I’d be glad to talk—about your goals, your challenges, and what may be possible.
Let’s build the bridge together, from challenge to solution.
After all, we work in infrastructure: bridge-building is in our DNA.
By Willem de Wit, 27th November 2025
© copyright 2025 Mobilé 4 flow & innovation
Founder & Managing Director of Mobilé 4 flow & innovation.