2036: Two hundred years to the day
The tram from Glenelg is full before it leaves Moseley Square.
Sam gets a seat because a teenager stands up for him, which he pretends not to mind. He's 53. His knee has opinions now. Across the aisle his daughter Ivy, 18, is reading the screen above the doors, the way she did when she was eight: to the CITY.
It's two hundred years since South Australia's government was proclaimed, by tradition under a gum tree a short walk from where they boarded, and the whole state seems to be heading into town to celebrate.
This line has carried electric trams between the Bay and the city since 1929. It's the one tram line Adelaide kept, out of more than 20 routes the Tramways Trust ran between 1909 and 1958. MTT lines map Everything else about their day, and whether Sam's brother Dean is on this tram or circling the city looking for a park, depends on which 2036 they're living in.
And that depends on what we decide in the next couple of years.
Same plans, two tracks
Dean is 46 and has been a plumber since he was 17. He lives in Salisbury, in the house he grew up in, and drives the ute into the city three days a week because that's where the work is. His younger brother Sam, 43, moved to Plympton when Ivy was born and works for a state department on Flinders Street. He drives too. The car park under the building is part of the package.
The day the foot-traffic story runs, Dean sends it to Sam from a job on Gouger Street.
Ivy is eight and happy. Probably because she’s got a jam doughnut from Dough to keep her entertained while her dad talks to her uncle on Gouger Street. Ivy has been looking at the car park above the market, the one with the ramp that spirals up three floors. She interrupts her dad and uncle.
“Why is the car park bigger than the markets?” she asks.
Nobody has a good answer. Dean says it just is. Sam, who has read the council’s transport strategy for work, knows it’s 25 spaces for every 100 people who work in the city, and that Sydney manages on 12 spaces for every 100, but he says nothing. Forty-three years has taught Sam one thing about his brother: you don’t win arguments by quoting academia. City of Adelaide
The city Dean parks in
On 22 September the ABC reported that foot traffic in the city fell from an estimated 138.8 million visits in 2023 to 122 million in 2025. The Property Council blamed lost car parks and new bike lanes, and also said the council needed to get more people living in the city. Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith pointed to working from home and a slow recovery from COVID, and said the city's parking compared well with other capitals. ABC
So let's talk about parking. In 2002 the Danish urbanist Jan Gehl's firm, working for the council and the state, estimated about 35,000 parking spaces in the northern half of the city centre. Similar-sized areas of other cities had far fewer: Perth 13,000, Lyon 12,000, Stockholm 8,000, Copenhagen 3,000. Gehl 2002 Nobody has counted all of it since. The council's consultants tally about 45,000 spaces open to the public and say the full total, including private car parks, is unknown. AECOM for the council, draft, Apr 2025 City councillor and urban planner Eleanor Freeman's own tally, published in September 2026, comes to about 54,000. Figures cited by the council put the city at 25 spaces for every 100 workers. Sydney has 12, Melbourne 14. City of Adelaide
Even though Adelaide has more parking per worker than Sydney or Melbourne, foot traffic in the city fell 12% in two years.
Whatever is keeping people away, it's hard to blame a shortage of places to park. Office vacancy sits at 16.3% (Property Council, July 2026). InDaily A council-commissioned study mapped 1,986 vacant or underused properties across the city and North Adelaide, about 30% of all properties in the CBD. InDaily
But here's what gives me hope. The plans already exist. Good people have done the work. Nobody has joined it up.
- City Plan – Adelaide 2036. 50,000 residents by the bicentenary; a City Loop tram branching off the North Terrace line and running down West Terrace, along Sturt and Halifax streets and up the city's eastern edge; and a tram link to North Adelaide, possibly via O'Connell Street. City Plan
- Hindley Street. A $50m upgrade with one-way traffic and wider footpaths, with construction from 2028. InDaily
- Light Square. A master plan to make its western side green and car-free, the option backed by 79% of those who answered the council's survey. CityMag
- O'Connell Street. A $15m redesign that keeps room down the middle for a future tram. CityMag
- Halifax and Sturt Streets. Named, with West Terrace, for "Healthy Street" master plans in the council's Integrated Transport Strategy (July 2025). City of Adelaide
The street upgrades on Hindley and O'Connell are funded. The trams, the City Loop and most of the master plans are not. The state says it has no plans to extend the tram network. CityMag Meanwhile the $15.4bn north–south motorway is due to open in 2031. DIT
The Hindley Street revamp
Receipt two March 2028The Hindley Street works start in autumn, as promised: two blocks dug up, one-way traffic, footpaths widened. InDaily Dean loses the loading zone he’s used for 11 years and parks in Light Square instead, which is still a roundabout with trees in it. He grumbles as he drags his gear into the plumbing job.
Sam doesn’t have an answer to Dean’s text yet. The council’s plan has a loop tram in it and the state has said it has no plans to build one. CityMag
Ivy is 10, and walks the block from the tram to Sam's office on the days she comes in after school. She has started counting the windows with nothing behind them. There are a lot. The council's own study found nearly two thousand vacant or underused properties. InDaily She's up to 41 on Flinders Street alone, and wants to know who's supposed to be in them.
The motorway opens
Receipt three August 2031The motorway opens on schedule. $15.4 billion, and for Dean, 16 minutes each way. DIT He is, for the first time in this story, completely right, and he enjoys it.
Ivy is 13 and has a phone, which means she has a Metrocard, which means she has started going into town without either of them. Sam checks the family tracker app more than he'd admit. Hindley Street is finished and looks good on a Saturday night. On a Tuesday, Ivy reports, it's the same street with nicer bins.
This is the year our city’s two futures diverge.
In one future, the loop tram is costed, argued over, and dropped in the next budget.
In the other future, it wins funding on the argument that a city about to spend $15 billion getting cars to its edge could spend a fraction of that moving people around it once they arrive.
This is where the story forks.
The Lift line2036 A. The tram stays where it is. The Loop line2036 B. The tram runs the loop.A timetable for Duber
Receipt four · Lift line May 2033Ivy is 15, and her weekends are a timetable of lifts. Netball at Mile End, a friend’s place in Marion, a job at the Glenelg cinema she can get to by tram but not home from after 10pm. Sam feels like an Uber driver: Dad Uber – Duber.
The after-10pm rule isn’t Sam’s. It’s Ivy’s. The tram runs, but the stop is on a dark road with nobody on it, and she has done the walk once with her keys between her fingers and a friend on the phone the whole way, talking about nothing so the line stayed open. She doesn’t tell Sam that part. He’d only agree.
Dean’s in the city less. The jobs moved to the new subdivisions up north where the parking is free and the driveways are wide. When he does come in, he parks at the edge and walks, and grumbles that Light Square is still a roundabout. The master plan was finalised in 2029. The money never came.
A hatchback and a loan
Receipt five · Lift line December 2036The tram runs the route it always has, up King William Street and along North Terrace to the Entertainment Centre. From the window Sam notices the gaps: shopfronts with paper in the windows, upper floors that have been dark since before Ivy was born. They get off at Rundle Mall and walk across to Hindley Street.
Hindley Street looks good, actually.
The upgrade finished in 2030: wider footpaths, trees, one-way traffic. On a Saturday night it’s busy. On a Tuesday lunchtime it’s a nicer street without many more people on it. Two blocks of good street, surrounded by everything that didn’t change.
Light Square is still a traffic island with trees in it. The master plan was finalised. The money never came.
The motorway opened in 2031, and for a while the drive in from the south was quicker. Then the traffic grew back, the way it tends to.
The city did get more people. Mostly students, in towers near the edges of the grid. But the streets between the towers never quite came alive, because there wasn't much to walk to, and nothing to carry you there except a car.
Ivy has the hatchback now, and the loan, and a fifth of her first pay going to it. She's on the tram today only because Sam asked, and because there was never going to be a park. Dean drove. He is somewhere near the Showgrounds, on his third lap, and will arrive in time for the fireworks and not the speeches.
Sam is 53. He has started thinking about the years when he won’t want to drive at night. In this Adelaide, that’s the year his world gets smaller. Ivy’s got bigger, and it cost her eleven thousand bucks.
The loop of liveability
The loop tram opens
Receipt four · Loop line May 2033The loop tram opened in the spring. Netball is still at Mile End and the cinema is still at Glenelg, but the friend's place is now an apartment over a shop on Halifax Street, and half of Ivy's weekend happens inside the loop, on foot or on the tram, without a lift from Duber.
The shops along the loop streets have been growing a floor or two of flats above them since the line was announced. Nothing tall. Just the empty upper storeys filling in, the way the empty ones on Halifax Street did first.
She takes the tram home after 10pm now, too. Not because anyone told her it was safe, but because the stop is outside a bar and a bakery that are still open, the footpath has people on it, and the next tram is never more than a few minutes away. The walk with keys between her fingers is somebody else’s story. Sam still checks the app. Less.
Dean's ute has a sticker on the windscreen that lets him into the loop streets between 6am and 11am, when the deliveries happen. He fought the permit for a year, and then found that a street with no through traffic and a guaranteed loading bay is the easiest street he's ever worked on.
Dean’s first tram trip
Receipt five · Loop line December 2036The Glenelg tram is the same. What's different is where it goes. At Rundle Mall, Sam and Ivy stay on. The council's first City Loop ran out on West Terrace and Hutt Street. It was redrawn a block in on each side, onto the streets where the new homes, shops and passengers would be, so the tram now runs the loop of liveability itself: off North Terrace, down Morphett Street, along Sturt and Halifax, and back up Pulteney. It opened a few years ago. The North Adelaide line now runs up O'Connell Street, over a rebuilt Adelaide Bridge, down the middle of the street the council kept clear for it back in 2027.
They get off at Morphett Street, because Ivy wants to walk the loop instead of riding it.
Today2036 B
People on bikes and on foot pass slowly, can stop on a whim and never have to find a park. With no parked cars in between, there are no car doors opening into the bike lane either.
My reasoning, not the manual’sThe slow, busy side of the street is kept together and the cars keep to the far lanes, so far fewer turns cross the paths of riders and walkers.
Reallocate space to influence travel mode choiceAdelaide Design Manual, 2016 · Street Design, pp.78–79
The stop sits right outside the shops, so every tram delivers customers to the door. Put the retail where the stops are and riders turn into foot traffic.
Step-free boarding, tactile paving and a zebra across the track.
places pedestrians, cyclists, and public transport users on equal footing with vehiclesAdelaide Design Manual, 2016 · Introduction, p.8
From the stop they walk a couple of blocks north to Light Square. Its western side is green and car-free, as the master plan proposed. There are kids on the grass where the Morphett Street slip lane used to be.
They cut through the middle first. Hindley Street went further than the council's 2026 plan: it's pedestrian now, like Rundle Mall, so one car-free spine runs from Morphett Street to Pulteney Street. It isn't a nicer street on its own any more. It's the heart of the loop. The 17 convenience stores that lined it in 2026 have mostly become other things.
North Terrace is the loop's top edge, where it meets the Glenelg line and the North Adelaide line. The loop tram runs the other three sides. Step off at any stop and you're already on it.
Just past the loop's east side, Rundle Street used to close to cars for Fringe weekends. Now it's like that every weekend, and weekdays aren't far off.
Pulteney Street runs down the loop's east side, from North Terrace past Hindmarsh Square to Hurtle Square, with the tram down the middle. Shopfronts at street level, apartments above.
And Halifax and Sturt, the healthy streets the council named back in 2025, have trees, slower traffic, homes over shops, and the loop tram running along them. This is where most of the new residents live. Families, not just students, because they can walk to a school, a park and a tram.
Today2036 B
Trees and garden beds between the tram and the bike lane, not a concrete strip.
wide enough to facilitate tree planting (minimum width 2.0 metres)Adelaide Design Manual, 2016 · Street Design, p.130
The bike lane took road space, which is exactly what the manual asked for.
Reallocate space to influence travel mode choiceAdelaide Design Manual, 2016 · Street Design, pp.78–79
One narrow traffic lane each way, slow enough to cross anywhere.
toward 30 km/hr in areas where there are high levels of pedestrian activityAdelaide Design Manual, 2016 · Street Design, p.89
Active ground floors: a café and shops where there were blank walls.
First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never worksAdelaide Design Manual, 2016 · Building Frontages, quoting Jan Gehl
Morphett Street closes it, tram and all, past Whitmore Square and back to Light. Four of the five squares in Light's southern grid, joined by an easy hour's walk.
The city's car parks haven't vanished. Most of them are still there, in the big parking stations near the edges of the grid. What changed is the streets inside the loop: loading in the mornings, disabled parking kept and added, visitors first, and the free two-hour shuffle gone.
Ivy is 18 and keen for a big one. The city is buzzing. People are dressed up for the bicentenary, roads are closed, restaurants have spilled out onto the streets, and everyone is walking to events all over town.
It reminds Sam of the Fringe, when the East End closes to traffic and car parks become alfresco dining.
Sam isn’t worried about Ivy drink-driving, either, because Ivy doesn’t have her licence. Half her friends don’t. Nobody told them not to; it just isn’t something their lives need. They’ve been getting around the city without Mum and Dad (Muber and Duber) since they were 15. The $11,000 that would have paid off a hatchback is the start of a deposit on an apartment in the city, near her friends and the uni she starts next year.
And Sam, at 53, is happy. He’s not up for a big one like Ivy, and he’s quietly stoked he didn’t have to drive in and won’t have to drive home in the dark.
His knee isn’t arguing with him right now, as he lengthens his step to catch up with his daughter. But he knows there’s always a tram stop nearby, where he can opt out of all this fun and ride home to the ’burbs.
Which 2036 do you want?
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What it would take
None of this needs a new idea. It needs about six decisions, and most of them are already half-made.
Nearly half of it is already within five minutes of a tram, and it is still idle. Track on its own hasn't done it.
3.6 km of new loop track, down Morphett, along Sturt and Halifax and back up Pulteney. On North Terrace the loop runs on today’s line, so trams keep circling the city. Paired with a homes program on every idle site the loop and today's line reach.
Over Adelaide Bridge, up King William Road past the Oval and round Brougham Place, then up O'Connell Street to Barton Terrace.
A branch from the Oval stop, up Sir Edwin Smith Avenue and along Melbourne Street, to the last cluster of idle sites north of the river.
- High + moderate sites in reach
- 41%
- New track, this phase
- —
- New track, in total
- 0.0 km
01Fund the loop tramNot funded
Fund the loop tram and the new Adelaide Bridge.
The council's City Loop is the plan on the table; running it on the loop of liveability instead is a design choice, not a different project. Estimates quoted by one councillor put the loop at "north of $500 million". InDaily The heritage-listed Adelaide Bridge would need upgrades estimated at more than $60m to carry trams. CityMag For scale, the north–south motorway costs $15.4bn. DIT
Why a block in from West Terrace? The council's 2016 Adelaide Design Manual treated the terraces as the city's green edge onto the Park Lands, noting they "often have a low frequency of public transportation services". A loop one block in runs past the homes, shops and four of the five southern squares instead. Adelaide Design Manual · Terraces
The loop only pays if the homes come with it. When Canberra's Auditor-General checked the light rail business case, the transport benefits on their own returned about 49c in the dollar; the case stood up on the land-use side, the roughly 6,100 homes since approved or proposed along the corridor. ACT Auditor-General, 2016 ACT Government, 2024 Planners call that transit-oriented development. In a square mile that is already one walkable catchment it runs the other way: put the tram past the empty upper floors and the squares, and decision 03 pays for decision 01. Newcastle built the tram and stopped there. It is the least-used line in the country. Daniel Bowen
02Build the consulted plansPart funded
Build the plans we've already consulted on.
Hindley Street, Light Square, O'Connell Street, and the healthy streets on Halifax and Sturt. The community has had its say on most of them.
03Idle buildings as homesMapped
Treat the 1,986 idle buildings as the housing supply they are.
From 1992 Melbourne's Postcode 3000 program used incentives and conversions to bring people back, and the number of homes in the central city rose from 736 in 1992 to about 9,900 in 2002, while weekday evening foot traffic almost doubled. Places for People 2004
Start with something the council has already run: in 2016 it matched shopfront upgrades 50:50, from $1,000 to $6,000, and 18 businesses took it up. Scale that up for ground floors that open back onto the street, and start on the loop streets, where the tram in decision 01 needs them most. Adelaide Design Manual
04Manage our car parksDebated
Manage the car parks we have, instead of adding more.
Visitors, loading, disabled parking and residents first, as Cr Eleanor Freeman argues. It's not a war on parking. It's using what we've got.
05Pair every tram with homesNot started
Pair every tram with homes.
Canberra's light rail came with rezoning along Northbourne Avenue: about 6,100 dwellings approved or proposed along the corridor since 2016, ACT Government, 2024 and unimproved land values in the corridor up 35% between 2011 and 2018, against 22% across the ACT. ACT Gov
Newcastle built a short, 2.7km line and carries the fewest passengers of any tram line in the country, about 0.9 million a year. Daniel Bowen
06Back the businessesNot started
Look after the businesses on the street while it's built.
Sydney paid about $31m to up to 154 businesses along its light rail, and a traders' class action still went all the way to the High Court, which found Transport for NSW liable in December 2025. ABC Parramatta's Church Street traders had no compensation scheme. ABC
Adelaide can do better: stage the works, and compensate from day one.
Status as at September 2026 · tap a line for the detail
What it would cost, and what comes back
A rough price on the tram, set against the motorway and against what the homes along it could return. These are estimates, not costings.
All three tram phases, with the trams and help for the businesses along them, come to about $1.3 billion: roughly eight cents for every dollar going into the $15.4 billion north–south motorway.
And what comes back?Up to $4.6bn in new homes and land along the lines, and around half the cost back to government by 2036.
The breakdown, phase by phase
These are estimatesThey are not a business case or an engineering costing. The loop reuses today’s North Terrace track, so only 3.6 km of it is new. Each phase is its length multiplied by what comparable Australian tram lines have actually cost per kilometre: from Adelaide's own 2018 North Terrace extension, adjusted for inflation, at the low end, to the Gold Coast's Stage 3 at the high end. The range is wide because tram projects often run over, with the Gold Coast's cost more than doubling. The figures leave out depot expansion, land, and the cost of running the service. The compensation line assumes about a third of the 450–600 street-front businesses on the routes qualify for hardship payments. The returns assume about 4,000–6,000 homes are built on idle sites by 2036, which depends on closing the funding gaps the council's own study found; GST goes to the national pool first, so South Australia's share is smaller. The idle-land shares come from the map above and are measured by map area, not property count.
Who this is hard for
A fair story names the people it asks the most of.
Women, after dark
To trust it. A tram only helps if it’s frequent, lit and busy. Until it is, the plan asks women to take a risk it hasn’t yet earned. In 2021–22, 23% of Australian women who used public transport alone after dark felt unsafe doing it. For men it was about 8%. ABS
Safety in numbers. Shops, homes and cafes on the loop streets mean people around after dark, and lit shopfronts instead of blank walls. A stop outside a busy street is a different place to wait than one outside a car park. Frequency and lighting still have to be delivered, and the trams are the state’s call.
The council’s 2016 manual asks for active frontages and eyes on the street. Adelaide Design Manual, 2016 · Building Frontages; Street Design p.76 Arup’s Cities Alive report reaches the same place: sightlines, lighting, transparent waiting areas and foot traffic as natural surveillance, with women in the design process from the start. Arup, UNDP and University of Liverpool, 2022 Plan International’s Free to Be mapping in Sydney found most harassment happens on and around transport, and not only at night. Free to Be
Tradies and deliveries
Fewer places to pull up at the kerb, and slower streets inside the loop.
Loading windows, 6am to 11am, and streets that still work for vans.
The council’s 2016 design manual already provided for it: “timed parking accommodates businesses … for example loading and service delivery vehicles”. Adelaide Design Manual, 2016 · Street Design, p.114
Business owners
Months of dug-up streets, fewer people walking past and lost trade while it’s built.
Busier streets when it’s done, and a way through the build: staged works, with compensation and marketing written into the council and state budgets from day one, not fought for afterwards.
Other cities got this wrong. Sydney paid about $31m to up to 154 businesses along its light rail, and a traders’ class action still went to the High Court, which found Transport for NSW liable in December 2025. ABC Parramatta’s Church Street traders had no compensation scheme at all. ABC
People with a disability
Change to streets, crossings and parking that people have learned by heart.
Level-boarding trams, and accessible parking kept and added, not traded away.
The 2016 manual was written with Guide Dogs SA, the Royal Society for the Blind and Disability SA, and asks for a clear building “shoreline” and uncluttered footpaths. Adelaide Design Manual, 2016 · Introduction p.8; Street Design p.96
The outer suburbs
Helping pay for a city loop they may rarely ride.
Shift workers
Relying on a tram at hours a car used to cover.
Trams that run late enough to get a nurse or a chef home.
Everyone on this platform is asked for something. Tap a passenger to see what, and what the plan gives back.
Here’s the thing… cars will always have a place in Adelaide. The question is whether they get every place. Adelaide doesn’t need to become Copenhagen. It needs to become Adelaide again, with better housing, electric trams, and the dunny indoors. Light gave us the plan. The council has the target. Good work is on the table. What’s missing is the decision, and the follow-through.
