WHITEPAPERS BY MARK COATES
March 2025
Creating sponge cities to tackle surface water flooding
This white paper, Creating Sponge Cities to Tackle Surface Water Flooding, is a timely and vital contribution to that mission. Pluvial, or surface water flooding, poses one of the greatest flood risks to homes and businesses across the UK, yet it remains one of the least understood by the public. As we continue to experience more intense and frequent rainfall, exacerbated by climate change and rapid urban development, the need for resilient, nature-based infrastructure has never been more urgent.
Feb 2025
Improving the performance of built environment systems
The built systems that underpin essential services, including transportation, energy, healthcare, water, sanitation, and communications, are the backbone of modern society.
Their complexity and interdependency have been growing for decades. Digitalisation is accelerating this process, and, in practice, we are now dealing not with stand-alone buildings and infrastructure assets, but with a complex and interconnected cyber-physical system of systems.
A Systems Approach to Infrastructure Delivery
A review of how systems thinking can be used to improve the delivery of complex infrastructure projects
When we think of great infrastructure projects, we often think of amazing feats of civil engineering: tunnels bored under cities, bridges erected over expanses of water, or railway lines criss-crossing the country. In each of these cases, they are of little use without a host of other elements working with them to create an integrated and functioning system – a railway line is of little use without signalling, trains or stations…
A Systems Approach to Infrastructure Delivery
Part 2: Putting the principles into practice
I carried out my review in the context of a series of high-profile projects that had ran into serious difficulties. Unfortunately, these problems were not one-offs. One of the most striking pieces of evidence, we discovered, was work from benchmarking consultancy Independent Project Analysis that showed that, globally, more than two-thirds of mega and major projects disappointed their owners in terms of cost, schedule or a failure to meet desired outcomes…
May 2024
Charging for Road Use White Paper
What is the future of mobility pricing?
Asking drivers to pay directly for their use of roads is
back on the agenda. In the UK, a series of recent reports from Parliament’s Transport Select Committee and a range of think tanks and research organisations have all advocated for a national pay-as-you-drive system to eventually replace Fuel Duty. In Europe, charging HGVs to use the road network is increasingly the norm, while many US states are developing schemes for charging electric vehicle (EV) users…
Oct 2024
Delivering a resilient transport network
Maintaining and future proofing highway infrastructure from extreme weather events
The changing climate is having a major impact on the UK ageing infrastructure. Flooding, higher temperatures, storms, and severe weather are more common and accelerate failures and disruptions on the network. We therefore need a more resilient transport network to ensure reliability for people’s travel and for goods deliveries. This requires future-proofing and maintenance of transport infrastructure…