In Transit: Five Key Questions with Peter Anderson, Managing Director, Transport Infrastructure, Amey

Peter shares his insights from a career spanning decades in the transport and infrastructure sector. As Managing Director of Transport Infrastructure at Amey, Peter has seen first-hand how safety, sustainability, and now AI are reshaping the industry. In this wide-ranging conversation, he discusses the biggest shifts in the sector, the commercial and operational realities of becoming more sustainable, and what he believes will define the future of transport and construction.

Reflecting on your time in transportation and construction, what's been the most transformative change you've witnessed, and how has it shaped the way the sector operates today?

Without doubt, the most transformative change I've witnessed in my career has been the progress in health, safety, and more recently, wellbeing. When I started in the industry, basic safety standards like wearing hard hats on construction sites weren't universal. Over time, we've seen huge improvements, particularly within larger contractors and infrastructure organisations, which have become embedded as standard practice.

In the rail sector, a particularly sobering milestone always sticks with me - the first year without a worker fatality on the UK railways wasn't until around 2015. It's hard to believe such tragedies persisted for so long. The shift in attitude and rigour around frontline safety has been dramatic and impactful.

Equally important is the sector's focus on mental health and wellbeing. Construction has one of the highest suicide rates of any industry, particularly among men. We're now seeing more data collection, open dialogue, and action plans to address this. It's about looking after the whole person, and making our environment psychologically safe for people to speak up. While AI promises a new way of working, I still believe these human-focused changes have been the most profound to date.

What do you see as the most pressing sustainability challenge in your area of the sector, and how is your organisation responding to it - through innovation, policy, or operations?

The single biggest sustainability challenge we face is embedded carbon in the materials we use, bitumen for road surfacing, copper for cabling, steel for infrastructure. Even as we make progress decarbonising our direct operations (for example, by electrifying our vehicle fleet and sourcing renewable electricity), these upstream materials remain a major source of emissions.

Market forces don't always align with sustainability. We often source materials from abroad, such as steel from Turkey or China, because local options are cost prohibitive. The result? Lower costs, but higher environmental impact. It's a difficult compromise, especially when those same materials are available domestically.

At Amey, we're actively working to reduce emissions by working with our supply chain. But until there are affordable alternatives to core materials like bitumen, or significant policy changes that incentivise lower-carbon choices with all stakeholders in the industry, the challenge will persist.

How do you balance commercial performance with the long-term imperative to become a more sustainable business, and where do you feel the biggest trade-offs or opportunities lie?

I don't view commercial success and sustainability as a trade-off. In fact, a sustainable business is often a more profitable one in the long run.

Take the landfill tax, for example. That single piece of legislation revolutionised how the industry handles materials. Now, rather than paying to dispose of soil offsite, we retain it for landscaping and noise bunds. It's a win-win: cheaper and more environmentally responsible.

Similarly, moving to EVs for our site vehicles brings long-term savings and reduces downtime. Once the charging infrastructure is in place, electric vehicles are simply better, fewer parts, less maintenance, fewer breakdowns. The big challenge remains Scope 3 emissions, the carbon from steel, concrete, ballast. We need clients and governments to step up and back innovation in those areas.

Where is AI already changing the game in your organisation or the sector more broadly, and what excites or concerns you most about what's coming next?

We're already using AI at Amey to create tailored, first-draft responses to our client's briefs, enabling us to harness best practice from across the whole business to develop higher quality solutions. It's a huge time-saver and improves consistency, but it still needs the human touch to refine and perfect. AI gives our employees time to do this and finesse our offering, which will hopefully drive up standards across the industry.

We're also beginning to use AI in design, basic geotechnical and structural analysis, and asset monitoring. It's about working smarter, not cheaper.

Longer term, I think AI's biggest contribution will be in asset performance, predictive maintenance, and eventually, enabling things like autonomous transport. The implications for safety, cost, and even how we design transport networks are enormous.

Looking ahead to 2030, what single shift do you think will most define the future of transportation and construction, and why?

Digitalisation. That's the game-changer. Whether it's autonomous vehicles, road trains, or intelligent infrastructure that can 'talk' to vehicles and adapt to real-time conditions, the future of transport will be data-driven and deeply connected.

We may not own vehicles anymore, they'll be shared, on-demand, and smart. Road signs, streetlights, even physical driver controls may disappear as automation advances. And that will completely redefine how we build, manage, and maintain transport infrastructure.