Sydney’s next Metro line could be paid for out of savings from the next four years of work, according to a new report from urban policy think tank Committee for Sydney.

“NSW has more than $112.7 billion in transport infrastructure on the way over the next four years,” said Gabriel Metcalf, CEO of the Committee for Sydney.

“If we could improve the cost efficiency of those projects by just 10%, it would provide more than $11 billion in savings, enough to pay for the next extension of the Metro network.” 

The Committee for Sydney has brought together the state’s foremost legal, construction and planning minds to identify actions to reduce costs across the full project delivery timeline.

In total Better Value Transport puts forward 40 recommendations – from how we decide what to build through to how we design and buy infrastructure, as well as increasing capacity of the sector overall – including:

• committing to spending a consistent amount of money (as a proportion of GDP) on infrastructure to smooth out demand for skilled labour and building materials
• creating a public register of design choices made as projects are developed
• embedding carbon reduction in the business case assessment of projects
• ensuring business cases always have “do nothing” and “sweat the asset” options presented to ministers before a new project proceeds
• releasing full business cases for new projects, and allowing the public to make submissions on both strategic and final business cases before they are considered by governments (with any confidential material confined to a single chapter and redacted). 

“We have done our best to come up with practical, actionable recommendations for government, drawing on the deep, real-world experiences of people involved with major projects in Australia and beyond.” 

“Many of the recommendations in this report will generate incremental improvements to project delivery and project costs, taken together they offer the opportunity to not only do more, but do it better.”

Read the Better Value Transport report here: https://sydney.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Committee-for-Sydney-Better-Value-Transport-November-2022.pdf