Design & Stakeholder Considerations for Highly Urbanised Environments to minimise construction delays and impacts to the community

Abstract

Sharing our experiences with trenchless projects in the Melbourne CBD will enable other projects that are working in highly urbanised environments to plan and minimise delays during the construction phase, where community and stakeholder impacts are much higher than during the planning phase. One of the critical tasks to minimise impacts was to identify key stakeholders along the alignment and engage with them early about project impacts and potential outcomes. This allowed us to understand their drivers and priorities to support our work via permits, relocating assets, or access requirements to their properties. Stakeholder requirements increase every year and projects in highly urbanised environments will always be complex. We were able to consider the requirements identified during stakeholder engagement in the design phase to help minimise the impacts and total traffic management requirements for the project. These requirements included working near: • pedestrian crossings • trams • heritage stormwater drains • delivery bays • other underground assets Design considerations include service locating all critical areas that may impact the design. If the project will be delivered in multiple stages, the methodology for connecting the stages needs to be finalised before each stage is complete. to avoid changes to the preferred methodology. Our findings benefit the broader community through shared learnings; impacts can be minimised and the project costs for trenchless will be lower because the chance of construction delays are lower. This will help trenchless projects be completed quicker and become more financially viable, resulting in a better experience for the community and stakeholders.