Station boxes are excavated for underground platforms, halls and facilities, while large developments are often installed above them.
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Stokes said a “culture of compliance” in NSW had led to an intense focus on reducing risk and liability in both the government and private sectors.
“I think any engineer who touches a project along the way … just wants to make sure that their responsibility is completely mitigated by throwing a little extra concrete and steel at it,” he said.
“The sum of all these small decisions where people just effectively cover their backs means we’re paying way too much and also contributing to global climate emissions because of our innate design conservatism, so we have to challenge that.”
The senior minister, who will retire from politics in the next state elections, said designing the state’s biggest projects more thoughtfully would reduce emissions, save time and taxpayers’ money.
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“We should be very proud of the fact that we design very, very robust structures, but the question to ask is, ‘are we designing them too much?’ There is a cost to the taxpayer for that,” he said.
“But there’s also a climate imperative because any additional design constraint that adds to the bulk of a structure makes it more carbon-intensive.”
The Infrastructure NSW discussion paper, coming out this week, recommends a whole government approach to measuring emissions in infrastructure.
The Decarbonising Infrastructure Delivery report says that multibillion-dollar investment decisions were made without any understanding of carbon mitigation or management over the asset’s lifetime. It warns that this could lead to potentially higher costs of retrofitting projects to reach net-zero in the future.
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The report also recommends maximizing the use of recycled materials in construction.
The United Kingdom, including the Glasgow Airport Investment Area, and Europe are cited as examples of governments considering the carbon impact of projects when considering their benefits and costs.
The NSW government warned earlier this year that it would have to cut back some of its massive infrastructure pipeline amid rising construction costs and limited workforces.
The government note follows a report from Infrastructure Partnerships Australia earlier this year calling for: ambitious, low-carbon result requirements on large projects.
Stokes said future state governments should rethink how they approach major projects, and instead start by questioning whether they should go ahead at all.
“In fact, one of the best ways to decarbonize infrastructure is to ask if we need such an expensive design intervention for megaprojects. Maybe there are other ways to achieve the same goal,” he said.
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