Scotty
Scotty, the five-metre-tall fibreglass Scotsman, is an Adelaide landmark. You know you’ve reached the corner of Nottage Terrace and Main North Road, Medindie when you see Scotty. He promotes Scotty’s Motel—or, as it’s now called, Comfort Inn Scotty’s. But does the sight of a Scotsman playing a bagpipe outside a hotel really sell it as a place to get a peaceful night’s sleep? It’s not as bad as a giant fibreglass Norman Bates wielding a knife, but almost. [HV]South Road
Bounded on the Western edge by sea and the Eastern edge by hills, Adelaide is a long, thin sort of a city.Running along a large chunk of the length of the city is a single road that extends from Aldinga in the very south through to Wingfield in the north. True to Adelaide’s simplistic style when it comes to naming roads, it’s called South Road.
It’s an odd road, in that it has two sets of address numbers, with the two number one’s immedately adjacent to the River Torrens road bridge in Hindmarsh (or Thebarton, depending on which side of the river you are on), and the street numbers going up from there on both sides of the river as South Road extends southwards…or northwards…Confusing at best.
It’s one of Adelaide’s busiest roads, as it is the only way to get from one end of the sprawling metropolis that is Adelaide to the other, without actually going through the city centre itself.
The late 1980’s saw major upgrading of the southern sections of South Road, with an overpass being built over the Cross Road/Noarlunga railway line crossing and the entire lenght of the road from Edwardstown down to the Torrens River remodelled to be fully two lanes with decent parking bays.
However, the Northern end still has quite a bit of work to be done on it. Cross the railway lines just after Port Road heading north and Adelaide’s main north/south road turns into a patchy surface mess of broken and mended surfaces with one and a half lanes at best of space.
Drive down this part of the road and you’ll quickly see that the houses and shops along this stretch are four or more metres back from the edge of the road, allowing for a decent road widening that would still provide a decent width of footpath. So, someone was doing something right and planning for the future.
However, ETSA saw this four metre width of footpath and decided to build a string of high voltage Stobie poles along it. Of course, being ETSA, the poles were placed smack bang on the gutter with South Road. So, now in order to fix up this part of road and widen it, the Stobie poles will have to be moved. As a result of the privatisation that ETSA was put through courtesy of the Olsen government, this will now not happen anytime soon, and Adelaide is left in the embarassing position of having a stretch of important road that semi trailers cannot travel in the outside lane on, lest the camber in the road cause the tops of their loads to hit the Stobie poles. [CL]
Southern Expressway
The mid 1960’s saw the development of the “MATS” plan, a design blueprint for 21st century transport in Adelaide put together by an American consultant.Being the 1960’s, and being conducted by an American, the plan, put simply, was the construction of freeways.
Lots of freeways.
The plan was scuttled by the Dunstan government in the early 1970’s, though some elements lived on in the form of the South Eastern freeway and the O-Bahn (which was, originally, slated to be a freeway along the Torrens).
One of the freeways that was called for was to link the Adelaide plains to the rapidly growing southern suburbs south of Darlington. South Road had been triplicated in the early 1960’s up to O’Halloran Hill then Reynella, and doubled beyond to improve flow but come the mid 1990’s it was not able to keep up.
Taking a leaf from the MATS plan, it was decided to build a freeway to link parts of the South to Darlington. To save costs, the road was only designed to be a one way road, reversible so that it took traffic into the city in the morning, while taking traffic out of the city in the evening. The cost savings may be questionable, as the reversible nature of the road requires additional infrastructure to be in place to handle the changeover, while the changeover window means that the expressway is closed to all traffic, twice a day, for one and a half hours each closure.
So much for “South Australia—Going All The Way?”. By my maths, the best that the expressway “goes” is 100%-((24 hours in a day-21 hours of usefulness)/24)*100%, or 87.5% of the way, and that’s assuming that no-one wants to go in the opposite direction.
But 87.5% is still better than nothing… [CL]
Stobie Pole
We can lay the blame squarely at the feet of Mr JC Stobie, the Adelaide Electricity Supply Company’s design engineer, for South Australia having the ugliest telegraph poles in the country, quite possibly the world. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time to make the poles with two long pieces of steel held together by a slab of concrete. ‘These’ll withstand anything!’ JC would have cackled to himself gleefully.
Numerous fights to the death between Stobie poles and cars full of drunken teenagers have proven him right. In fact, Stobie poles probably kill more South Australians than sharks, red-back spiders and tiger snakes combined. And while sharks at least have some lethal grace about them, Stobie poles are simply hideous.
Attempts at beautification have included growing geraniums up the poles, and, most notably in the Adelaide suburb of Prospect, painting works of art on them. Renowned artist Clifton Pugh contributed a stunning interpretation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but scandalously, he painted the couple without any clothes on.
Quite properly, Adelaide’s moral guardians insisted he go back and cover up the rude bits. [HV]