Matthew Abraham: Tear up Rundle Mall, free King Willie St, it’s time to liberate our streets!

It’s time to rip up Rundle Mall and run over all the orange witches hats ruining Adelaide’s reputation as the 20-minute city writes Matthew Abraham. What do you think?

The rot set in for Adelaide’s laughable road network the day they pumped champagne into the Rundle Mall fountain.

It was September 1, 1976, when a crowd of 10,000 people surged around the fountain for the Mall’s official opening and the free bubbly then Labor premier Don Dunstan had piped into the waterworks. He really did.

An enduring image of the day was a bikie scooping it up in his helmet and guzzling it by the bucketful. Heaps classy, Adelaide.

It was prophetic that Dunstan arrived in a horse and cart because the slow strangulation of our city’s roads can be traced back to that fateful day in 1976.

The bulldozing of Rundle Street, a wonderful strip of tar for motor vehicles, to create what is now a glum, God-forsaken pedestrian mall, was the beginning of the end of Adelaide’s much-vaunted claim to be the “20-minute city”.

It was the launching pad for a now deep-seated mindset among our all-powerful state and council transport bureaucrats that roads aren’t really for cars.

The champagne flowed the day they opened Rundle Mall, but it was the beginning of the end for the 20-minute city, writes Matthew Abraham. Picture: Advertiser Library

No, they’re for people to perambulate, sip lattes, eat smashed avocado on sourdough toast and generally goof off.

The good news is Adelaide is still a 20-minute city. The bad news is it now doesn’t mean it only takes 20 minutes to get from Point A to B.

In the new 20-minute city, you now spend at least 20 minutes on any trip stuck in your car going nowhere fast.

If this sounds like an exaggeration, the Commonwealth’s peak planning body Infrastructure Australia calculated that in 2016 drivers in greater Adelaide were spending around 60 per cent of their travel time in congested traffic at a cost of about $1.4bn that year.

At a rough guess, that figure today would have to be nudging 80 per cent and you could double the economic impact figure.

By 2031, it projects that drivers on the city’s most used roads can expect to spend “between 55 per cent and 70 per cent of their trip in congestion at the AM peak”.

“Despite the upgrades to Adelaide’s north-south corridor, this will remain one of the city’s most congested routes,” it forecasts, adding that “many of Adelaide’s roads will be operating over their design capacity”.

Ah that’s more like it. Cars driving down Rundle Street 1970, before the Mall was built.

We’ve never spent so much dough on roads so why do they keep getting slower, not faster?

This isn’t simply about the abject failure to co-ordinate traffic lights on West Terrace. Let’s just give up on that one and concentrate on launching citizens into outer space from Lot Fourteen.

At the heart of the problem is a lackadaisical view of the importance of the efficient movement of commuter and commercial traffic on our roads. Roads, by the way, paid for entirely by drivers.

Just look at how local councils have trashed two important north-south roads – King William Road in the inner south and Prospect Road in the inner-north.

They’ve been turned into boutique shopping villages, next to useless for anything with wheels wider than a shopping trolley.

The true culprit in all this is Orange Traffic Cone Syndrome, or OTCS.

Unlike COVID-19, there’s no vaccine for OTCS.

It is impossible to complete a journey anywhere in Adelaide without encountering traffic cones and speed restrictions.

While these are meant to protect roadworkers, very often they’re left in place for no visible reason, often for days or weeks on end.

Roadworks on King William Street in 2019. Photo: AAP/MIKE BURTON

The completed section of North-South motorway is meant to run uninterrupted at 90km/h but for weeks the long stretch between Port Road and Regency Park has been adorned with orange traffic cones and a 40km/h speed limit.

At tradie peak hour from 7am, traffic crawls along this section with no sign of roadworks. It’s a typical case of OTCS.

Want to build an apartment block?

Sure, block off a couple of lanes for a year or so. No hurry.

In December 2017, just weeks before the March 2018 state election, Labor transport minister Stephen Mullighan introduced a sensible permit system with modest penalties ranging from $100 to $500 an hour to encourage roadworks outside of the busiest road periods.

It was axed by incoming Liberal transport minister now backbencher Stephan Knoll within a month of taking office.

It’s been a free-for-all for the orange cone gangs ever since.

You know where this is leading. Liberate our roads. Not so much Free Willy as Free King Willie. Dig up those dodgy Rundle Mall pavers, pour down the hot black stuff and bring back Rundle Street in all its glory.