Matthew Abraham: Untold lie about the North-South Corridor

When it comes to the $14.5 billion North-South Corridor, the truths buried on websites reveal the real problem, writes Matthew Abraham.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and so is the road from Gawler to Old Noarlunga.

It is, of course, not a road as we know it. Nothing costing taxpayers $14.5 billion can carry such a mundane description.

It is the North South Corridor, or to give it the full works, the largest infrastructure project in South Australia’s history. If you rolled the eye-watering cost of the new RAH and the desalination plant into one bundle, you’d still end up with roughly $10b in loose change.

That’s how big it is.

How did a bit of a tidy up of the bad bits of South Road turn into the road that ate Adelaide?

Is it too late to erect a giant “Go Back You Are Going The Wrong Way” sign over this project? We’ve still got time, you know.

They won’t be firing up the giant tunnel-boring machines – or TBMs in the fluoro-vest game – until 2023 at the earliest, and even then they’ll only be chewing underneath what’s left of your house at a leisurely 8-10 metres a day.

Last week, the Sunday Mail brought us exclusive details of the full design for the $9.9 billion

Torrens to Darlington project. It included the first glimpse of plans for twin-, three-lane tunnels in the northern part and an elevated section to protect heritage sites, especially the Thebarton Theatre and century-old Queen of Angels Church.

It also appears to swerve slightly to save an unofficial heritage site – Vili’s bakery and cafe at Mile End. A victory for sausage roll power.

We all know the Torrens to Darlington stretch simply as “the hard bit” or the “missing link”, but the government brands it T2D, easily confused with R2-D2, the Star Wars robot.

This 10.5km stretch traverses the “Castle Plaza” bottleneck in the southern end to the “Brickworks” choke point at the northern end, affecting hundreds of big and small businesses and 393 homes, at the last count.

When it is complete by 2030, the North South Corridor will finally be complete.

The corridor will then be a 78km stretch of “congestion busting” non-stop motorway, with the dual south and north tunnels linked by a shandy of raised and lowered motorways, with not a single traffic light anywhere to be seen. It’ll be the Great Wall of Adelaide.

It’s hard not to be impressed by the scope of the engineering and the Herculean physical job ahead. I’m impressed, and I don’t even like it.

It’ll gobble up 100,00 tonnes of steel, 470,000 tonnes of asphalt, three million tonnes of quarry dirt and rock and 760,000 cubic metres of concrete. The tunnels will generate more than eight million tonnes of “spoil material”. And of course, it’ll make 4900 jobs at its peak.

All very good. But here’s the sticking point.

The Department of Infrastructure and Transport website groans with information about the project and one phrase is repeated over and over. It is this: the T2D will “unlock Adelaide’s road network”. No it won’t.

This mantra only holds true if you regard Adelaide’s “road network” as South Road and the east-west road links that bang into it. If all goes to plan, that will be “unlocked”. You’d hope so for $14.5b.

But what of the rest of the roads in greater Adelaide? Have you driven on Cross Road lately? How about Belair Road? Or Main North Road? Prospect Road? Or any other roadway that isn’t South Road? They’re chockers on weekdays, and are now increasingly busy even on weekends.

Transport Minister Cory Wingard’s media release last week stated that 16 per cent of all trips across Greater Adelaide rely on a section of the T2D project or its “adjacent parallel alternatives”. Doesn’t that mean 84 per cent of all trips in our city don’t rely on this stretch of South Road? How does it unlock them?

One statistic buried in the transport department’s guff about the T2D design is damning.

“Only 15 per cent of Adelaide’s road network has a free-flow travel speed exceeding 50 km/h, compared to 55 per cent of Sydney’s and Melbourne’s, 86 per cent of Brisbane’s and 91per cent of Perth’s road network,” it states baldly.

What a disgrace. It confirms what Adelaide drivers, stuck in the never-ending slow lane, know in their bones. A city-wide transport plan, including public transport integration and investment, is the real missing link in our road network.

The North South Corridor is a start, but our governments are having a lend of us if they think it will be mission accomplished come 2030.