What is Rundle Street For?

So organisers want to close Rundle Road for 2024's Adelaide Fringe to expand The Garden of Unearthly Delights and Gluttony. This set off a flurry of talk on Reddit, I chimed in with a snide remark:

Rundle Street should be pedestrianised anyway, and Rundle Road closed for the Fringe sounds great

Which triggered some people who just couldn't understand how Rundle Street could possibly be pedestrianised. Which leads to the question:

What is Rundle Street For, anyway?

Rundle Street is a terrible as a throughfare. It's a single lane in each direction, and ends at a T junction at Rundle Mall. There are bike lanes, but the crappy kind that regularly force cyclists into traffic thanks to parked cars. The on street parking means drivers need to be hyper-vigilant for pedestrians.

If you need to travel East/West in the CBD, almost every street is better at getting you there than Rundle.

So if it's not really a throughfare, is it a destination? Well, it is full of restuarants, bars, and retail shops. Rundle Street is a destination, but it's not great at it.

Like most of the "entertainment" streets in and around the CBD, Rundle Street sucks to be outside on, because too much space is given to cars, and there's too much traffic. Rundle Street, Melbourne Street, Hindley Street, Gouger Street all have alfresco dining, and they are all held back because they're used as arterial roads through the city.

During the day, outside of busy times, walking around Rundle Street is so weird. there are heaps of pedestrians being held up at lights for a tiny number of cars. The amount of space given to, and the priority of cars is ridiculous when you look at how the street is actually used. This is highlighted in the traffic data - only around 5000 cars travel on Rundle Street each day. We're ruining a place for hardly anyone.

Rundle Street is fantastic when it's closed off from traffic. During Fringe, or Illuminate, or when they decide to do on-street markets. We should do this permanently. Rundle Street is the ideal candidate for a low-traffic future.

It could be a great place to be if you got rid of the on street parking (keep some loading zones for deliveries, etc), made it one way, and made it pedestrian priority. You could open up the outdoor seating beyond the narrow footpaths, plant trees, improve foot traffic and use of the space.

Imagine a better, more inviting place - having an (almost) car free area from North Tce, Rundle Street, Vardon Ave, through to Grenfell. It would be so nice.

It would also help to make the CBD a better place to live. Right now the CBD kind of sucks, unless you're a uni student. It's part of a bigger discussion about how to make the CBD good - especially given how usage has changed post-pandemic. A shakeup of Rundle Street and the alleys around it is just one part.

And it wouldn't even have much of an effect on cars, since Rundle Street sucks for cars already.