Five emerging transport leaders create utilities digital platform solution

A national digital platform now being piloted across Brisbane’s Olympic infrastructure program and major projects in Western Sydney and Perth began with a team of emerging transport leaders setting out to solve one of construction’s most persistent problems: accessing accurate underground utility information before work begins.

The research project, developed through the Transport Australia Fellowship, has evolved into the Before You Dig Australia (BYDA) Digital Utility Portal, which centralises underground utility data so planners, designers and contractors can identify buried infrastructure faster and make better decisions before construction starts.

The projects fellows are Clarissa Ahlberg, Qld Highways Team Lead at HDR; Ho Yee Ryan, Associate Civil Engineer at BG&E — part of SYSTRA; Anita Mumford, Principal Civil Engineer at AECOM; Brendan Rutter, Technical Director at Mott MacDonald; and Georgia Robazza, Head of Commercial and Major Investment, TasNetworks.

L–R: Ho Yee Ryan, Clarissa Ahlberg and Brendan Rutter. Image: Supplied

“A design engineer could spend a week manually interpreting up to 100 pages of maps to understand what is underground at a single location,” Ahlberg said. “The portal can complete the same task in about an hour. We wanted to develop something practical that would make everyday work safer, faster and more productive across the industry.”

The portal could save industry an estimated $22 million and 180,000 working hours each year, Transport Australia said, with more than 15,000 underground utility strikes reported in Australia each year, costing the economy an estimated $4.6 billion through project delays, service outages and lost productivity.

“Most people never think about what is beneath the ground until something goes wrong,” BYDA CEO Mell Greenall said. “The Fellows brought us strong research and a practical industry case. That work helped build momentum for a platform that can support better decisions before anyone picks up a shovel.”

Image: (L–R) Brendan Rutter, Ho Yee Ryan and Clarissa Ahlberg. Image: Supplied