‘Absolute madness’: Adelaide City Council considers introducing citywide 30km/h speed limit

It is too slow? Adelaide City councillors met last night to discuss speed limit proposals that included limiting all streets in the CBD to 30km/h. Vote in our poll.

Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith says the proposal to cut the city speed limit to 30km/h is “a longstanding discussion”.

A citywide 30km/h speed limit proposal has been met with backlash with one councillor calling it “absolute madness”.

Councillors met on Tuesday night to discuss Adelaide CBD street speed limit proposals that included three options; a blanket 30km/h limit for all city streets, 40km/h for most of the roads, or a mixture of both with major arterial roads remaining at 50km/h.

In March 2022, the Adelaide City Council resolved to investigate the current speed limits to “help support businesses and residents for a safer urban environment”.

After the resolution, Stantec was commissioned to undertake the citywide speed limit review and the three options were put to elected members on Tuesday night.

Adelaide City councillor Henry Davis, on Wednesday morning told FIVEAA even considering lowering the limit to 30km/h was a waste of time.

“It’s madness … I don’t even know why we were sitting in a council meting for about an hour and a half considering this as a viable option,” he said.

“We struggle to get people into the city, we have massive commercial vacancy rates, we have huge congestion, and we’ve just come out of Adelaide 500 – and now a lot of councillors are entertaining a city wide 30km/h speed limit.

“To my mind this is absolute madness, you would shut down the city if that was the case.”

Three options have been proposed; a blanket 30km/h limit for all city streets (seen in green), 40km/h for all the roads (in yellow) or a mixture of both. Orange roads are 50km/h – the current default speed limit for most of the CBD. Picture: Adelaide City Council.

However, Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith, also talking on FIVEAA, said the plans were just in the proposal stage with the investigation instigated by the previous council.

“We shouldn’t get our knickers in a twist at this stage because this is a longstanding discussion,” she said.

“We had a workshop, there were no decisions made and for a lot of us it was the first time we thought about the patchwork across the city,” she said.

“There is a nuance about speed limits, on one side it’s the risk and the safety and if you go to the road accident research people there will tell you if you’re hit as a pedestrian at 50km/h you’ve got a 90 per cent chance of dying whereas if you’re hit a 30km/h you’ve got a 10 per cent chance of dying.

“The other side of the argument is people’s convenience and how easy it is to get around.”

She said the city could collect more data about traffic routes and there was always a balance.

“It’s a long way to go before we make a decision – I initially thought that it would be good to have a uniform speed across the city but I think we do need faster routes around the ringparts and outer routes and through traffic

Currently, the City of Adelaide has a number of different speed limits within the city border.

A 60km/h speed limit applies to the roads around the council border and to most of the roads which travel through the Adelaide Parklands with a 50km/h speed limit in place for most roads.

However, a 30km/h speed limit is already in place on three roads including Plane Tree Dr, Hindley St and a section of Grote St in the middle of Victoria Square.