Metropolitan Adelaide Transport Study
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Metropolitan Adelaide Transport Study, or MATS, was released in 1965 and examined the then-current and future needs of transport for Adelaide. Then - and now - relatively small town for an Australian capital city, Adelaide's road transport system had not changed substantially since the post-war construction of the city's first major arterial roads.
MATS became politicised as initial public reaction became a party stance. South Australians were opposed to freeways on the basis of an aversion to the gridlocked images portrayed of interstate and overseas freeway-dominated cities. The influence of the Commissioner of Highways, then very strong, saw the acquisition and gazetting of large tracts of land for future use for freeway construction, even though no immediate plans were announced to begin construction on any of these roads.
Successive changes of government in the 1960s and 1980s ensured that MATS was shelved. By the 1980s, road reserves and land gazetted for future use in MATS projects had been progressively sold off by various governments, ensuring that even when needs or public opinion changed, the construction of most MATS-proposed freeways would be impossible. Some of the city's current transport bottlenecks would have been solved had the originally proposed freeways been constructed.
The Southern Expressway is the southern section of the second of the three MATS freeways which were still viable to construct. The first, the South Eastern Freeway, was completed in 1979. The third, the Port River Expressway, was opened in 2005, which partially follows the original Modbury to Port Adelaide Freeway proposed by MATS.
