2. Make the case beyond money
Many major transport infrastructure projects do not always stack up from a narrow financial perspective. Successful sustainable transport and city projects will often articulate and weigh up the qualitative benefits to the community. While factors with monetary values are easy to calculate and compare, we must think beyond financial metrics. For example, how does a project improve wellbeing, social cohesion, community safety and youth engagement? How does it regenerate nature, protect water systems and encourage pollinators? Emphasising the importance of qualitative benefits and consideration of significant long-term change will influence decision-making and deliver projects that shape a better environment.
3. Create value throughout
Projects can create value in more ways than simple financial outcomes. A vision-first mindset can help create non-monetary value in a welcoming, desirable and healthy environment.
For example, some major projects have a strong vision for more access to nature and restoring waterways. To achieve this vision, transport solutions can be developed to support that vision rather than using cosmetic greenery around roads and parking. Given that it can take many years to reach the planned outcomes of a major project, such initiatives provide essential gains in the short-term and can help convince the local community that the long-term vision is one worth pursuing.
4. Deliver with complexity
It is one thing to know the right thing to do, but it is quite another to deliver it with the complexity of working across government departments, owners and stakeholders. Major infrastructure projects are complex and can become derailed by siloed working or disjointed strategies. Often the long-term solution will require short-term pain in order to change behaviours, or to release land from highway space for alternative uses – in many cases causing increased congestion or other negative outcomes that can be politically unpalatable.
A complex long-term plan will often need to be delivered in deliberate and specific phases in a defined order to lock in benefits as the plan is delivered over time. This requires delivery stakeholders to understand their role in that delivery and the need for collaborations across departments to ensure that the intended outcomes are achieved. If a design narrows a busy highway to reduce impact on a city, it must also enhance public transport, educate the travelling public, implement other relief measures to provide alternatives to the use of the highway, and discourage car use with restrictive policies. It must also lock in benefits to prevent induced demand and accept that congestion will increase in the short-term until behaviours change. All of these must be delivered in the right order with the right delivery partners to achieve the desired outcomes.