Re: [SA] Incredible article in Advertiser today

[bscaro@yahoo.com (Ben Scaro)]

> Well I left over 20 years ago wishing for something like this, believing
> that Adeliade needs this big time, and it comes from The Advertiser - what a
> shame. A shame it's written up in there and a shame it will never happen in
> the foreseeable future.
> 
> Ivan

I agree.  But South Australia is one state, like Tasmania where I am
from, where everything is always a 'shame'.  You hear it so often . .
. . shame this or that didn't happen.

But 'this or that' is often enough a hugely expensive pie-in-the-sky
scheme that is never going to happen.  In the meantime, as we hang out
on the jetty waiting for the ship carrying that 'big project', *real*
incremental improvements that could have been made to existing
infrastructure are not made, and the infrastructure continues to
decline, or gets a band-aid, so that it can die more slowly and with
less electoral impact- case in point, the Overland.

In Tasmania, where I worked for a couple of years as an industry
development officer, we'd gone a bit more po-mo with the concept. 
Instead of just ruing the fact that things weren't happening, we'd
moved on to ruing the fact that we had such a negative attitude !  I
guess at least that's one step towards recognising the problem.

I love Adelaide.  As a place, I think it has so much potential. It has
good weather, great natural beauty.  It's the right size, one million
or so . . . big enough to feel like a city, small enough to be
manageable.  It has culture, good food, and I don't need to mention
the wine.  It's relaxed.

But like Tasmania, it needs to cheer up a bit and just get on with
what can be done.

I think the SA government should just bite the bullet and close the
rail lines one line at a time to standardise or convert to light rail.
Surely it can be done incrementally- it is a fairly small system.  And
everyone knows which lines need to stay heavy rail, and which need to
go light rail.

For the main line to Melbourne, why not just work in increments ? -
work on straightening out two or three curves and a couple of grades a
year.  A few years of that and an hour will be lopped off train times.

That's my rant . . .

Ben