With hot summers and mild winters, Adelaide is Australia’s 5th largest city with just over 1 million citizens. Then its nice to be able to get around in an easy way. In most of European cities at this size, there are both trams, metros and subways helping out. Oslo for example with only 600 000 citizens got trams, metros and trains (transit categories). It means that the traffic sollution is sort of solved at places where the transit lines reaches, but on places where they don’t, the traffic jams are quite high during high peaks.
Australia Transit situation Today
Australia’s two bigger cities Sydney and Melbourne, does offer some sort of transit connections. Sydney does have train connections and some light-rail lines. The town had a well known Monorail line, but it was taken down which is very bad. Thinking of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia with its Monorail line, which is great! Taking down such touristic magnet is bad, because many that I’ve been talking to looked at Monorail of Sydney as the town icon. I was devestated when the news about to take it down came. Shame on you Sydney! On top of this, Sydney doesn’t offer any good tram, light-rail or metro service. Not good.
Melbourne on the other hand got an extensive tram system, which is built on the road street level, so the tram have to share tracks most of the time with cars. Taking the tram to the town is long because of this. Distrita urges Melbourne to think new and put its tram system in middle of Avenues or put some of the lines underground in the city center. Look at lots of European cities with trams Melbourne, or just look at how Adelaide have done it!
What does Adelaide offer that beats Melbourne and Sydney
The tram is very new. It was opened in 2007, but runs mostly on its own right-of-way as a modern tram line should do. There is only a small part near the Glenelg town area which is on street level. These stations are done great and the ride is comfortable people say. On 22nd of March 2010 the last part to Entertainment Centre was done. The only way to go forward now is to extend and build more of this. Put some parts of the line underground if its possible in the city center. Remember that trams can run underground and act as fantastic Metro also! Think wider Adelaide.
Including the new tram, there is also train connections in the city. Northern part is diesel driven, but the southern part is now also electrified which is a good move! Both trains and trams meets at Adelaide Station. Here you can also take the train to Sydney in north east, Perth on the west side, Darwin in the north and Melbourne in the east of Australia. This is something which I admire Australia about though. The train system simply takes you to all of the most important cities, even if they are far far away from each other. The Australian cities transit systems needs to improve, .. but Adelaide is certainly one of the few cities in Australia going the right way.
