The Tennyson Centre is a large commercial building on the western side of South Road, about 500 metres north of Anzac Highway, hosting a large number of business tenants, all of them in the healthcare industry. A casual look at a satellite image shows that, if the motorway were to continue straight north from the Anzac Highway underpass, the Tennyson Centre would be directly in its path. Therefore, one might suppose that the government will acquire the Tennyson Centre as yet another property to be demolished to make way for the motorway. But that’s not what their plans (up to now) have shown.
Instead, their plans show the motorway curving awkwardly around the Tennyson Centre, demolishing a large number of properties on the eastern side of South Road, and then curving back around to the western side north of the Tennyson Centre. Putting such a tight curve in an otherwise straight motorway is obviously undesirable, and given that it would leave the Tennyson Centre standing virtually alone on that side of South Road, it would also be a very visible and permanent monument to the government’s poor planning.
When I asked why they were doing this, they cited the high cost to acquire that building (it recently sold for almost $93 million). However, they did say that they had looked into it for a while, which means they acknowledge that curving the motorway around it is a less-than-ideal solution. This situation raises some serious concerns about the way road planning is done in SA.
I don’t know what was built first – the Anzac Highway underpass or the Tennyson Centre, but either way, the situation should have been avoidable. When the underpass was built, the government at the time prominently advertised it as the “first step to a non-stop South Road”, which means they saw it as part of an eventual continuous motorway. The fact that they built it just barely wide enough to accommodate three lanes in each direction shows this. If the Tennyson Centre was already there at the time, then why did they build the underpass on the western side of South Road? Surely the eastern side would have made much more sense. But if, on the other hand, the Tennyson Centre did not exist at the time, then why did they allow such a large and expensive building to be built on land that would be needed for the future motorway? Either way, it’s a serious planning failure.
I had earlier suggested that the government should just swallow its pride and fork out the hundred million or so that it would cost to acquire the Tennyson Centre, and build a replacement building somewhere to accommodate its tenants (the old LeCornu site opposite Ashford Hospital seems like the perfect place). However, if we think out-of-the-box a little, there is a solution that can give us a fairly straight motorway without demolishing the Tennyson Centre or the properties on the other side of South Road. Impossible, you say? Read on.
The distance from the Tennyson Centre building to the middle of South Road is about 35 metres. This is enough room for the motorway, which, at four lanes each way (each lane 3.5m wide), would only measure about 30m across. This means we can fit the motorway in this space, alongside the existing southbound lanes of South Road, but then where would the northbound lanes of South Road go? The answer: around the western side of the Tennyson Centre, as shown on this map (zoom in to the area just north of Anzac Highway). This would require purchasing some properties, but fewer than would be required on the other side of South Road under the government’s existing plans. While there would still be some curvature in the motorway between the underpass and the Tennyson Centre, it would be much gentler than the curve in the government’s existing plans.
The Tennyson Centre would lose all its parking spaces on the eastern side as well as some on the western side, but new parking spaces would be built in acquired land to the north and south to replace them. A noise wall would be built alongside the motorway, just a couple of metres from the eastern edge of the building, and if necessary, new windows installed on that side for soundproofing. The noise wall would also act as a boundary fence. Some minor renovations might also be needed to turn the rear entrance into the new front entrance for the building, and the cafe may need to be compensated or bought out.
While there’s no perfect solution to this unfortunate planning bungle, I would consider this option a win-win, in that it gives us a reasonably straight motorway while avoiding the cost of acquiring the Tennyson Centre and relocating its tenants, and reduces the number of other properties that need to be purchased.