A timeline for the privatisation of State Transit, the state government owned bus operator, has today been revealed. The first tenders will go out next month and the process is expected to be complete by April 2022.
Each region will be tendered separately, with Region 8 (Lower North Shore and Northern Beaches) being the first put out to tender next month. This will be followed by Region 7 (North West and Upper North Shore) and then Region 9 (Eastern Suburbs and Inner City).
The indicative timeline for the tender and privatisation is as follows;
| Region | Request for Tender | Tender Awarded | Operator Commences |
| Region 8 (North)
(Brookvale, North Sydney and Mona Vale depots) |
May 2020 | May 2021 | October 2021 |
| Region 7 (West)
(Ryde and Willoughby depots) |
August 2020 | August 2021 | December 2021 |
| Region 9 (East)
(Port Botany, Randwick and Waverley depots) |
November 2020 | November 2021 | April 2022 |
The new operators will begin services in Region 8 by 1 October 2021, Region 7 by 1 December 2021 and Region 9 by 1 April 2022.
The decision to tender all three regions separately, instead of at the same time, came after market sounding determined that privatising all regions at once was far too ambitious. Further, with the impact of COVID-19, potential operators wanted more time to consider their bids in order to be in the most competitive position. With Region 8 attracting the most interest from potential operators, it was decided that it would be the first to be privatised.
At this stage, there is no firm sign of which operators will be tendering or control of these regions. Despite this, it can be reasonably assumed that all major players would be interested in these lucrative contracts. Potential tenders include Busways, Comfort Del Gro Corporation (as CDC), Deutsche Bahn (as Arriva), Kinetic, Keolis Downer, Sea Link Travel Group (as Transit Systems) and Transdev.
It had previously been announced in October 2019 that the government had intended to tender out all regions other than Region 6 in 2020 for new contracts taking over on July 1 2021. This included all the State Transit regions. As the State Transit tenders have been spilt, it will likely also mean changes to the tender process for other regions as well.
Transport NSW Blog 
We look forward to the outcome of the tenders.
LikeLike
its disgusting the the government has done this what are they going to do when there is no more public assets to sell… increase tax of course our kids are going to suffer see public transport is provided cheap because we pay tax now its private wont be long before it goes up through the roof it has to stop
LikeLike