April 2014
| Business World Magazine | 151
money on the busier roads.
“It’s almost axiomatic, but the term bang
for the buck applies. If 10,000 people hit a
bump on a busy road, or 1,000 people hit a
bump on a less-busy road, which is prefer-
able? It’s a pretty straightforward concept,
but how you do it can get quite complicated
if you let it.”
Still, while the nature of the work puts a
lot of public works people and asset manag-
ers in a constant state of planning for future
needs and projects, Shepherd said the rela-
tively flat growth in Leeds and Grenville over
the years has taken away some of the need for
a constant future focus.
The combined population in the coun-
ties was 96,206 according to the 2001 cen-
sus, skipped up 2.7 percent to 99,206 in the
2006 census and upticked just a tenth of a
percent to 99,306 in 2011.
It doesn’t mean the job is easy, Shepherd
said, but perhaps easier than it could be.
“There’s no population growth and traffic
growth is quite modest, so in those situations
we’re just renewing what we have,” he said.
“We don’t have a need to upgrade capacity.
If it’s a secondary highway, it’s going to be a
secondary highway for decades.
“In one corner where we’ve got some more
significant growth, we’ve done some more
