South Road: Past, present and future
Following the federal government’s announcement it’ll allocate $1.5 billion to complete the North-South Corridor, we decided to have a look back at how one of SA’s most important roads has evolved over the years.
Did you know that until the 1970s, South Rd was comprised of a number of smaller roads?
Yep, that’s right. South Rd, as we know it today, was once made-up of Shillabeer Ave, passing from Regency Rd to Torrens Rd; Government Rd between Torrens Rd and Port Rd; John St between Port Rd and Grange Rd; Taylors Rd between Grange Rd and Henley Beach Rd; Fisher Tce between Henley Beach Rd and Anzac Hwy; and South Rd from Anzac Hwy southwards.
South Rd has existed in some form or another for almost as long as South Australia, with the route mentioned in newspapers as far back as 1842. On 2 April, the South Australian Gazette references sheep stations near the corner of South Rd and Sturt Rd, which is now in the suburb of Bedford Park.
It’s the first of many mentions of South Rd, with the major South Australian corridor featuring in newspapers throughout the state’s history for both positive and negative reasons.
In 1913, the Daily Herald labelled road conditions “deplorable” while images of cars splashing through a flooded South Rd appeared in The News in 1937.
Numerous car crashes along South Rd have been reported in South Australia’s newspapers, with the most poignant image appearing in The Observer on 21 February, 1925. The front page of the newspaper features a photograph of a vehicle destroyed by a train at Hilton, killing the two occupants.
South Rd upgrades
As the state has grown, so has South Rd, with a variety of projects undertaken over the years to improve safety and congestion.
In 1952, automatic boom gates were installed at the Emerson Rail Crossing at the intersection of South Rd and Cross Rd, before an overpass was built over the junction in 1984 to remove the bottleneck.
As traffic steadily increased along South Rd through the 1980s and 1990s, the route became more congested, with RAA lobbying the state government to upgrade several intersections that were contributing to traffic jams during peak hour.