Title: The Role of Adelaide's Transit Oriented Developments Towards Creating a Low Carbon Transit Future City
Abstract: The release of the 30 Year Plan for Greater Adelaide (30YPGA) in 2010 set out an ambitious plan to transform a car oriented city into a transit oriented city. This would ultimately be achieved by developing a network of over 30 centres built to transit oriented development (TOD) principles connected by densely developed transit corridors. The 30YPGA implies that this will result in an environmentally sustainable city in which transit induced carbon emissions will be greatly reduced. This should be achieved through a modal switch for work journeys from private car to public transit, cycling and walking and through people choosing housing that is co-located near or in TODs, thereby minimizing the need to travel by car. However, given that the 30YPGA reassures Adelaide's populace that at least two thirds of the metropolitan area will remain unchanged (i.e. low density car dependent residential development), the overall changes to Adelaide's urban morphology may be modest at best. This paper explores Census data to examine the scale of transport related carbon emissions reductions that can be achieved by the 30YPGA over three stages: (1) a CBD centric interim park and ride phase commuter model where existing car trips to the CBD are substituted with park and ride; (2) a CBD centric commuter model using a TOD and transit corridor network; and (3) a fully fledged TOD network where residents collocate their jobs and housing to minimize their need for carbon inducing urban transit. A caveat with this research is that it focuses only on the transport related component of greenhouse gas emissions and does not include carbon emissions related to housing and embodied energy. The paper concludes with suggestions for how the 30YPGA needs to be modified or improved if a low carbon transport future is to be achieved. Background Conscious efforts at modern metropolitan strategic planning for Adelaide, a middling mature Australian metropolis of approximately 1.23 million people (ABS, 2013 at www.censusdata.abs.gov.au) commenced with the 1962 Metropolitan Development Plan (Forster and McCaskill, 2007). Whilst the 1962 Plan may not have immediately clarified Adelaide's transport future in terms of providing a clear plan for how Adelaide's residents would travel around their metropolis, it did commission the Metropolitan Adelaide Transport Study (MATS), which was eventually released in 1968. The main intent of that Study was to propose a 96km freeway network, complete with grade separated interchanges, along the lines of a North American city, which implied a car oriented city with the majority of people travelling by private car to fulfill the bulk of their daily urban travel requirements. The Transport Plan set out in the 1968 MATS recognized that people would still use public transit for commuting trips and indeed envisaged a subway under King William Street, despite its overwhelming emphasis on the car. A significant characteristic of the 1968 MATS is that it did include a connected freeway/expressway network (see figure 1), however, it did not integrate this network with Adelaide's suburban centres in a coherent manner. At that time, Adelaide's economy was underpinned by automotive manufacturing with two large car plants, Chrysler at Clovelly Park (opened in 1964) in Adelaide's southern suburbs and General Motors-Holden (opened in 1958) at Elizabeth in Adelaide's north, so it was perhaps logical that the private car would dominate Adelaide's urban transport solutions for the forseeable future. In hindsight, the stillborn $436m MATS Plan ($6bn in 2013 prices), was an overly ambitious technocratic approach that ignored the intense community backlash over the impact on of the proposed freeways (Llewellyn-Smith, 2012; Badcock, 2001). The MATS Plan was abandoned in 1982/83 and to date, only the outer legs of the freeway network, the South-Eastern Freeway, Gawler by-pass and the Southern Expressway were eventually built. Within the built-up area of metropolitan Adelaide, the Plan envisaged in the MATS Scheme failed to come to fruition. Interestingly, in an echo of the MATS Plan, albeit with a different road alignment and road interchanges, the State's 2005 Infrastructure Plan did include a continuous north-south grade separated arterial road along the South Road alignment extending from the Southern Expressway to
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-11-29
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot