Plan to slash city speed limits hits road bump
Ten Adelaide gateway roads could see limits dropped under an Adelaide City Council speed limit review. Find out if your route to work could be affected and take the poll.
The Adelaide City Council members on Tuesday night discussed reducing speed limits on the key gateway roads into the CBD in a bid to be consistent with city ring councils like Unley.
It would mean the default 50km per hour speed limit would apply to all ten roads into the city despite some currently being marked as 60km per hour zones.
But instead of progressing to the council meeting next week for a decision, the item was deferred to another committee meeting in October.
Under the plan, speeds would drop to 50km per hour on Sir Donald Bradman Drive, Glover Avenue, Goodwood, Montefiore, Botanic, Glen Osmond, Wakefield, Bartels, Main North and Jeffcott roads.
Port Road was not listed in the council report but was flagged as potentially needing a lower speed limit in the future as construction of the new Women’s and Children’s Hospital continued on the thoroughfare.
West Terrace, Anzac Highway and Mann Road would keep the 60km per hour limits, as would the city ring route of Robe, Fitzroy and Park Terraces.
No decision was made at the council’s Infrastructure and Public Works Committee meeting last night, though the original recommendation on the agenda was to support the speed drop.
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A change in limits would follow the City of Unley’s move to reduce Unley Road speeds to 50km per hour from 60km per hour in February this year.
The council had been investigating safer urban speed limits since 2022, and received crash data from Stantec in November 2024 that found 2400 crashes occurred in the City of Adelaide in five years.
Four of those crashes were fatal, 211 resulted in serious injury, and 658 resulted in minor injury: a rate of one person being injured nearly every second day on City of Adelaide roads.
Arborist and truck driver Matthew Slee spoke to the committee on Tuesday and said he believed 50 km per hour was not slow enough for the roads.
Slee said councillors had previously claimed they would follow the evidence so the council should run a five-year trial of 40km per hour and then make a permanent decision based on the results.
Lord Mayor Dr Jane Lomax-Smith agreed with Slee that the speed limit should be lower for safety reasons, but said it was “irrational” to lower the gateway roads to 40km per hour when the city default was currently 50km per hour.
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“It will be much more sensible to have a default of 40 but let’s remember we don’t have a blanket [speed limit] in any description across the city,” she said.
The council rejected the idea of a blanket speed limit of 30km per hour at its first meeting of 2025.
Councillor Henry Davis requested a report with more information about the circumstances of accidents that occurred on the gateway roads and why these roads were chosen for the change.
“I live in Aldgate, I don’t live in the city, I drive in,” Davis said.
“A lot of people tell me every single day, like not every single day, but very often, that they don’t come into the city anymore because it’s too hard to get in, there’s too much congestion, they can’t find a car park, and so they just never come to the city, and they go somewhere else.
“That has a big impact on our city, and we need to be able to get people into the city.
“So where there is an opportunity to go a bit faster, say, on a weekend, coming to the city to make your life a little bit easier, why do we want to restrict it down when that doesn’t necessarily result in a fatality?”
According to Stantec research commissioned by the council, nine in 10 people who collided with a car travelling at 50km per hour would die, whereas the risk of death is reduced to one in 10 at 30km per hour.
Lomax-Smith said the gateway roads surrounded the park lands and they were “heavily peopled” with children, sports teams and cyclists.
“The more roads you have at 60, the more people will die. It’s not rocket science,” Lomax-Smith said.
“The fact remains that 60 is high, it’s dangerous. We should deal with the park lands and then look at the city and work out how we can make it safe for children going to school and for people in residential streets.
“We have lots of residential streets where there is no need to be travelling at 50 kilometres an hour, particularly my street, where people zip along at a rate of knocks.”
She said it was important to have “uniformity” rather than a “patchwork” road network.
Newly-elected councillor Eleanor Freeman said last weekend she attended Super Cycle Sunday, a council-run community event including a cycle demonstration, and there’s “a clear appetite for speed reduction”.
Any decision to change speed limits must be approved by the Adelaide City Council and the Department of Infrastructure and Transport.
