Index & Notes

General Power Law Principle

For infrastructure, I kept finding semi-log relationships in both water and sewer. That's also a power law, an even more dramatic one since every additional infrastructure problem comes exponentially less often. If the X-axis is the number of potholes in a road or main breaks on a water main, it's arithmetic, where the Y-axis with number of kilometres of road or pipe or wire is logarithmic.

I first spotted the exponential relationship between how bad a pipe was and how many of those I had to worry about, around 2001, and it was the most stunning insight I gained in my entire career. It was the how very closely the phenomenon obeyed the law, that dropped my jaw.

© Roy Brander, P.Eng 2016