This deep scar in Adelaide’s parklands that will shave just 3 ½ minutes off your O-Bahn ride

THIS is the view East End residents wake up to each morning – heavy machinery gouging a “massive wound” into their corner of the parklands - and all to save just three-and-a-half minutes on an O-Bahn ride.

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THIS is the view East End residents wake up to each morning – heavy machinery gouging a “massive wound” into their beloved corner of the parklands.

The gaping trench next to the Rymill Park lake will become an entrance to the tunnel that is the centrepiece of the $160 million O-Bahn City Access Project, for which close to 80 trees have also been felled.

Excavation work for the new O-Bahn tunnel entrance. Photo: Michael Marschall, Sunday Mail.

East End Co-ordination Group president David Williams, who overlooks the excavation from his sixth-floor East Tce apartment, said it was an “atrocious exercise” but the “least-worst option” compared to previous plans to put “a freeway” through the parklands.

“Trees that take 50 to 100 years to grow were down in half an hour. What was there will take 20, 30, 40 years to come back,” he said. “But if they do the landscaping really well things won’t be so bad as they are now.”

Rymill Park Kiosk operator Paul Harding said the “noisy and dusty” works, designed to shave three and a half minutes off the O-Bahn journey, had slashed his weekday trade by 75-80 per cent.

Lack of access from the Rundle Rd side on Saturday mornings deterred potential customers, many of whom believed “the whole park was gone”.

The deep trench, in Rymill Park. Photo Michael Marschall

Mr Harding – son-in-law of former kiosk owner and lord mayoral contender Arnie Rossis, who recently lost his battle with cancer – said he would likely have to shut down by the end of the year.

“They said all the workers would come here but that hasn’t happened. I’ve sold one hot dog since they started. That was five or six weeks ago now,” he said.

The O-Bahn extension, which is employing 450 people during the con-struction phase, is designed to shave a few minutes off bus trips and reduce city ring-route traffic congestion.

Priority bus lanes on Hackney Rd will lead into a tunnel beneath Rundle and Rymill parks. Design changes lengthened the tunnel to lessen its impact on Rymill Park, but it still surfaces by the lake. Plans to realign Rundle Rd with Grenfell St were abandoned.

Adelaide Park Lands Preservation Association secretary Shane Sody said the trench was “a massive wound in some-thing so many . . . people loved”, adding: “The obsession with bus timetables at the exclusion of all other values would be laughable if it wasn’t so tragic.”

An association newsletter to be released today claims freedom of information documents uncovered by Greens MLC Mark Parnell prove the State Government was always intent on the rezoning regardless of the outcome of public consultation.

The project will be finished late next year.

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