Adelaide Traffic

The thing that surprises me about the South Australian election last weekend is the lack of discussion and apparent interest in the "seriously broken" Adelaide transport and traffic management system.

No party raised it as an issue and no-one offered a solution to the problems. It was as though these problems don't even exist. All I can say is that both major parties are apparently blind. Or perhaps because the key individuals on both sides are driven around in big white cars - they don't actually notice the issues.

The system is seriously broken - the infrastructure is old and the day to day management is dysfunctional. There has been no plan and no integrated investment or management for decades. And the scary thing is that the locals and their political representatives appear not to have noticed. But everyone who visits definitely notices.

There was a time 30 odd years ago when the state actually *got* traffic management - and had an appropriate plan in place and clever people who knew how to design, build and manage a smart system.

In fact the traffic planning and management skills that were developed in Adelaide during the Dunstan and Bannon eras formed the basis for a substantial South Australian based export industry. The skills developed there were used to export consulting services across Asia and Europe and the rest of the world. There was a time - aeons ago now - when Adelaide based traffic and transport consultants were in demand in China - and were advising on traffic and transport management issues there.

But as I said that was aeons ago. Various state governments since then have closed that industry down. For about the last 30 years Adelaide has done less than nothing to enhance and develop their traffic and transport systems - and the upshot of that is that an industry that developed skills locally and exported them internationally - just disappeared.

This is the *guts* of what has happened in South Australia over the past 30 years - across many industries. And the question that we should be asking both Mike Rann and Isobel Redmond is - Why?