I WOULD like to highlight some facts around the Edith Street issue.
The Austroads recommended maximum local road vehicles per day is 1,500, Edith Street carries 2,400.
Their maximum speed measure (85 per cent) is 40kph, on Edith Street it’s 52, in peak hour it’s 65.
The maximum peak period carrying percentage should not exceed 20, on Edith Street it is over 50 per cent.
In these guidelines a street exceeding any one of these maximums requires an engineering solution be installed.
DIT delivered a report to council in 2016 detailing the many problems and a list of solutions.
One of those was the incidence of vehicles cutting through back streets or ‘rat-running’, citing that it was already a major problem and predicted to get worse.
So far council has not acted on a single recommendation from DIT.
The expected cost of implementing ALL the DIT recommendations which included two multi story car parks was $16m.
Gawler Council instead decided to spend $13 million on new offices for themselves, rather than spending the money on the wider community.
Edith street was found in an independent study to be the street carrying the highest and most unacceptable level of rat-run traffic in Gawler.
More than 300 vehicles per day travel down Edith Street at more than 65 kph, two clocked doing 99 kph.
The bend in Edith Street is a blind corner at which there have been multiple near misses involving pedestrians and rat-runners.
Do we need a fatality to occur?
Google MAPS (GM) will direct you down Edith Street for two reasons.
It chooses the shortest route, and it monitors traffic via your smart phone GPS, the more vehicles that cut through Edith Street the better GM thinks the route is.
If you check the GM route travel time and then shift the route out to the main road you will find that diverting down Edith Street does not save you any time at all most times of the day.
I have lived here in Gawler for nearly 14 years now and have watched the traffic degenerate from bad to worse.
Rather than viewing the residents of Edith Street as the enemy for standing up to council and demanding they do something about this problem, perhaps the rat-runners who stand to lose their cut-through should instead demand council do something about the wider problems they have chosen to ignore for decades.
Edith Street resident Gawler
