Peter Goers: The Festival Centre has been relegated to the poor cousin in this unwanted mega-development

This is the result of years of work and the privatisation of the most important public space in SA, writes Peter Goers.

You’ve probably lost your car in an underground carpark. You’ve been on the wrong floor clicking your transponder in vain.

The other day I found my car but then got lost trying to get out of Adelaide’s newest and worst carpark.

I was driving around the new Festival Car Park (so named even though it serves the Festival Centre badly) and I was bushed because the signage is appallingly bad. The exit signs are tiny and few, and there’s an arrow on the slippery polished concrete floor that leads you straight into a wall.

This is our taxes at work. This is the result of the privatisation of the most important public space in SA. The development project is a shaky, vexed collaboration between multinational developer the Walker Corporation and Renewal SA (the SA government’s development arm). It’s a nightmare.

It’s taken nearly seven years to build a perfectly bad carpark to replace the perfectly bad, leaky, too small but very handy Festival Centre Carpark. Progress?

The magnificent and beloved Festival Centre has been the proud focus of this precinct for nearly 50 years.

Workers put the finishing touches on the car park entrance in Festival Square. Picture: Mike Burton

It has been relegated to the poor cousin in this unwanted mega-development and it has been endlessly compromised by the developer and two state governments.

The centre had to block off its main entrance and create a new one. It lost its carpark for nearly seven years and it still has no sheltered approach for patrons.

It has had to close twice for six months at a time while this carpark and plaza (still years away) are built.

The casino has been allowed to build a hideous, dated, gold hotel abutting the Festival Centre and the Walker Corporation will build a 27-storey office building between Parliament House and the casino.

The Festival Centre was designed to be seen in its own space and is now being boxed in. The new plaza will be a commercial precinct full of shops, cafes and fake trees.

On June 19 on leaving the Festival Theatre, the new carpark payment machines were not working and neither were the boom gates.

There was instant gridlock and huge queues of cars trying to leave, and a poor security guard trying to raise the boom gate manually with very limited success in a carbon monoxide fug.

It took me 40 minutes to get out and I was near the front of the queue. Rather than these issues being fixed, they got worse.

Weeks later, balletomanes returning to the carpark found the payment machines still not working and the glacial egress kept them in gridlock for up to two hours.

The access from the carpark to the theatre is through a badly drained building site open to all weathers and with a mysterious ramp that leads to a locked door.

In the carpark you are badly led to an area to access the Festival Centre, Adelaide Oval and the CBD.

This is a cul-de-sac with 34 parks out of the 1560 parks available. There is vast carparking for Parliament House and three floors for the casino and the new hotel including valet parking.

The Walker Corporation belatedly promises an undercover thoroughfare from the carpark to the Festival Centre.

When I was checking out the carpark last Tuesday I met with a Deep Throat who informed me there may be a second undercover thoroughfare. If true, this is contrary to the statement supplied to the Sunday Mail and Renewal SA, which, at the time of writing, has not responded for requested information, despite its slogan being “We Plan. We Engage. We Enable”.

The Festival Centre still has no direct undercover access, yet the casino and new hotel have a lavish and convenient driveway off Festival Drive.

The Festival Centre deserves so much better and so do the taxpayers. At least there’s plenty of time to fix all this as the Festival Centre has to close again for another six months to enable bad neighbouring development, which seems never to end. For shame.

Peter Goers can be heard weeknights and Sundays on ABC Radio Adelaide