Utility Pavement

The utility pavement is a somewhat original idea, from within the OCF. It consists of a pavement / sidewalk / road system that has easy access to utilities.

A potential problem with a newly built community, and a problem that faces existing communities (especially ones that are expanding rapidly) is that of getting utilities (gas, electricity, water, data connections etc.) to all the houses / buildings around the community. Currently in most places (certainly in the UK) a lot of these utilities are provided using pipes and cables that are placed below roads and pavements (as these are used to connect most buildings anyway). The problem with this is twofold:

1, any improvements or repairs to the infrastructure, for example to fix a burst water pipe, require digging up a section of the road, which is expensive, and more importantly disrupts the use of the road. This can make improvements take longer to implement, and can cause more problems due to unknown infrastructure etc. 2, to avoid this problem somewhat, improvements generally need to be quite significant, and are usually done in a way that will somewhat future proof the system, so they don't have to dig up the road again, this means the improvements will require a large upfront cost in most cases.

These problems are somewhat mitigated by using multi-use pipes that can fit a number of data / electricity wires or utility pipes in, but this isn't an ideal solution. A better solution is using utility tunnels Wikipedia / Utility Tunnel

In an OCF based community, where forward planning, and increasing growth is going to have to be a key consideration, a utility pavement would be a suitable solution.