TROUBLED bridge over water or egress to success, Peter Goers ponders pedestrian transport to Adelaide Oval.
So let's build a bridge, as they say in the classics, and get over it. A footbridge.
Impresario P.T. Barnum famously needed a way to get crowds out of his museum of curiosities, so he erected a sign saying: "This way to the egress."
Egress and ingress from and to public transport and the city is crucial to the new super-duper, much-needed Adelaide Oval/ Stadium.
The footbridge - which may also become a perambulatory hall of fame for famous SA sports people - needs to get people to public transport and into the city to buy more coffee, baguettes, fast food, booze and even Louis Vuitton handbags.
This is pleasing to the Adelaide Festival Centre and the Casino, which will benefit from madding crowds rushing towards their very mixed (even, to use a trendy word, diverse) pleasures.
The Labor Government has wisely committed to all this including a much-needed 40th anniversary upgrade and redevelopment of the Festival Centre.
The best thing that's happened to SA recently is that we may lose our holy AAA credit rating from the ridiculously named Standard and Poor's. What use is a Labor government if it doesn't spend money on public projects, the arts, development and while they're at it, the poor?
No one will lose sleep if our credit rating is reduced to AA, which certainly serves the Energizer bunny very well. It's all the better for SA - the Energizer Bunny state.
We need to get this whole arrangement right and not get a troubled bridge over water, although the water is troubled by blue-green algae, too. We might finally fix that while we're at it and does it really matter if the rotunda is moved? Hey, look, a vision splendid. Possibly, please. OK?
Apparently there are five designs for a footbridge under consideration by the Department of Transport, Energy, Infrastructure and Rod Hook.
Let's ponder the two most likely. The first is designed and promoted by the Melbourne firm, Ashton Raggatt McDougall and takes the footbridge to the west of the Dunstan Playhouse, thus obliterating the new West Wing offices of the Festival Centre.
It seems this bridge will lead thousands of hyped-up sports fans into the loading dock of the Intercontinental Hotel and they'd have to then go up via stairs, ramps and escalators to the city. It's the cheaper option and boo, hiss.
The other spectacularly appropriate option takes the bridge higher and through the shells of the Festival Centre across the Plaza and sensibly to the extant footbridge across the driveway and into the city and to public transport and even the casino. Directly. On the level.
Crucial to all of this, is the Hajek Plaza which looks like a technicolour tank trap behind Parliament House.
Otto Hajek was a Czech/German sculptor who specialised in extremely ugly plazas posing as art. They generally involve concrete blocks on strange angles painted in primary colours.
It is not the most memorable testament to the Dunstan Decade and is a barren, spiritless place, neither use nor ornament. A waste of space. It's partially hidden by yakkas which fools no one.
It could be our Federation Square and a triumphantly accessible public space for all manner of amenity and we'll get a preview of that in the next festival.
It will be redeveloped with an expanded carpark underneath which hopefully won't leak and this, with footbridge, is the option favoured by a rare consensus of the Adelaide Festival Centre, the casino and the Intercontinental Hotel.
We may also get an office and apartment building behind Old Parliament House which could offset the costs of the precinct.
The Festival Centre is a great symbol of our city and it desperately needs renovation and expansion. The CEO and Artistic Director, Douglas Gautier, has worked wonders there and re-engaged it with SA and deserves a chance to do more. It gets 900,000 people a year through it's doors, many more than the Adelaide Oval and casino.
The Festival Centre is ideally qualified, placed and suited to have control of the plaza precinct and the carpark which provides crucial revenue.
People will stroll along the new west bank past shops and cafes to regenerated parklands, all the way to Southwark and Bowden.
The focus of Southbank in Melbourne is a bloody casino. Here the focus of our west bank would be parklands. What more can I say. Bravo.
It seems, the casino will not expand, the arts will prosper and we get more use of the Festival Centre and more public space and parklands. The footbridge is the higher road to these successful destinations.
Let it prosper and grow, unlike the ever-stymied dreaded Victoria Square. Let's have a happy ending at last with just the right bridge to the future.
Peter Goers can be heard weeknights on 891 ABC Adelaide
[email protected]
on the plus side guess it will kill time when people get bored at the test matches and sheffield shield matches 