Road & Civil Surveys provided construction surveying support for Stages 2 and 3 of the M4 Smart Motorway — NSW’s first smart motorway and a $470 million program introducing intelligent transport technology across 35 kilometres of one of Sydney’s busiest motorway corridors, carrying 170,000 vehicles per day.

Delivered by Seymour Whyte for Transport for NSW, the $170 million Stages 2 and 3 package covered approximately 19 kilometres of the corridor and included the installation of 54 overhead gantries ranging from 30 to 60 metres in span, upgrades to 5 interchanges, construction of 46 maintenance bays, and installation of variable message signs, traffic sensors, CCTV, ramp meters, and speed and lane use signage. Supporting civil works included earthworks, pavements, stormwater drainage, noise walls, and power and communications infrastructure upgrades.

The project went on to win the CCF National Earth Award for Excellence — recognition of the outstanding delivery by the Seymour Whyte team.

Our Role

With 5+ surveyors deployed across the corridor, RCS was embedded within the Seymour Whyte delivery team to provide survey support across both stages simultaneously. Our scope covered set-out, verification, and as-built surveys for overhead gantry foundations and structures, interchange upgrades, earthworks, pavements, and associated civil infrastructure.

A defining feature of this project was the volume of night shift work. With 170,000 vehicles using the M4 daily, the majority of survey and construction activities within the live motorway corridor were completed during night-time road closures — compressed work windows where every hour of closure counts and survey delays directly impact the construction program.

RCS also delivered detailed data calculations and end-of-month reporting to support Seymour Whyte’s commercial management and program tracking across the two stages.

Driving Value

The M4 Smart Motorway was one of RCS’s early major project engagements — and it established the working relationship with Seymour Whyte that would carry through to Narellan Road, Berry to Bomaderry, and beyond.

RCS drove value through reliability under pressure. Night after night, across a 19-kilometre live motorway corridor, our team delivered accurate set-out for gantry foundations, pavement works, and interchange modifications within tight closure windows — ensuring construction crews could maximise productive time before the road reopened to traffic each morning.

Our data calculations and EOM reporting gave Seymour Whyte’s commercial team consistent, reliable quantity data across a corridor where tracking progress manually was impractical. This combination of field execution and data delivery across a high-volume, night-works-dominated program demonstrated RCS’s ability to perform at scale on complex motorway infrastructure — a capability that has underpinned our growth ever since.

• Construction surveying and set-out for overhead gantries, interchange upgrades, pavements, and civil infrastructure
• Night shift survey coverage across a 19km live motorway corridor
• Data calculations and end-of-month reporting
• Verification and as-built surveys
• Multi-crew deployment (5+ surveyors) across Stages 2 and 3