Re-imagining Adelaide’s Public Transport System

I believe that Adelaide could be the most livable and most learning City on the Planet.

The “most liveable” city in the world will get the balance between Public and Private transport right. It will be “liveable” for the old and the young, the rich and the poor.

Why couldn’t Adelaide have the cleverest, most vibrant public transport system for a town of it’s size on the planet ?

No Reason at all.

But we have to want it first.

At the moment our Public Transport mode share (9.9%) is about the lowest in Australia and that is our accepted norm.

Even our state plan is soft and timid.

Increase the use of public transport to 10% of metropolitan weekday passenger vehicle kilometres travelled by 2018.

I like the old saying “If you shoot for the stars you might not get there – but you are less likely to come up with fists full of mud”.

At the moment our state plan shoots for the mud.

The solution ?

We need to re-imagine our network design.

As recommended by leading experts we should toss out our current hub (city) and spoke design and design our Network around the very layout that Adelaide is globally famous for  – our grid.

I propose that we create The Adelaide Metro Grid – with buses running frequently in a straight line along our major roads, where transfers are presumed and every major intersection becomes a transfer point.

I believe that we could achieve a major improvement to service (and increase in usage) with a redeployment of existing assets and spend.

In particular we should be able to make it easy for parents to send their kids to school by bus and avoid a car drop-off.

Imagine if every day on the roads  was like it is in school holidays ? We would not need massive new capex on roads, we could reinvest a fraction of that future spend on making the Public Transport system even better.

Other cities have done this – why can’t Adelaide be clever ?

There are no real reasons that Adelaide could be the most livable and most learning City on the Planet.

The barriers are only in our heads.

 Here’s a link to my full paper on the topic Re-imaginingAdelaidesPublicTransport (pdf)

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