Ivan S. Lazarev

ReviewOctober 2, 2026 · IAE‑2026‑OCP‑001

Fixed and Variable Components of Social Cost in Open-Cut Pipeline Renewal

Ivan S. Lazarev

Open-cut street works impose costs on parties who are not paying for them: drivers held in a diversion, a shopkeeper whose frontage is fenced off, a household on a temporary supply. Research quantifying them ties its estimates to different physical quantities, and the categorical inventories the field presents itself through hide that difference. This review reorganises that literature for water main renewal by the quantity each estimate is tied to, distinguishing four accrual classes of cost: costs arising per street opening, per unit of trench extent, per unit of work-zone duration, and per affected receptor. Each class is crossed with the cost bearer and an evidential verdict, then tested against the terms renewal-planning models declare. Costs arising per opening and per receptor carry monetised evidence yet no grouping criterion in the reviewed models carries either, and they fail differently: the receptor class is reachable by no term those models declare, the opening class only through aggregation terms no reviewed study uses for an external cost. Against object length the classes decompose as the title announces: the per-opening class and the length-independent part of the per-receptor class form a fixed component, the per-extent class a proportional one, the per-duration class a mixed term with a length-independent floor. Dividing a programme into shorter objects raises accrual events faster than total length, and those two classes are the ones that grow.

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