Getting around inner Adelaide without a car

Adelaide is a driving city by habit rather than necessity. The inner suburbs the map covers — the coast to the foothills, Prospect to Mitcham — are flat, gridded and served by a public transport network that all runs under one name, Adelaide Metro, on one ticketing system. This is a guide to using it, written for people who have just arrived and are trying to work out which line, which stop and which of the several kinds of vehicle they are looking for.

One station, six lines

Everything on rails begins at Adelaide Railway Station on North Terrace, under the casino and beside Parliament House. It is a terminus: every train arrives, empties and goes back out. That makes the network easy to read — there is no through-running, no “which platform for the city” — and it means a trip between two suburbs on different lines goes via the terrace. The station sits inside the free city zone, a few minutes’ walk from Rundle Mall, and the tram stops outside it.

Where the lines go

• Seaford and Flinders share the tracks south-west through Mile End, the Showground, Goodwood and Clarence Park before splitting — Seaford on to the coast at Brighton and down to the southern suburbs, Flinders to the university and hospital at Bedford Park.
• Belair leaves the same southern corridor at Goodwood and climbs into the hills through Unley Park, Mitcham and Blackwood — the one line on the network with a gradient.
• Gawler runs north through North Adelaide, Ovingham and Islington to Salisbury, Elizabeth and Gawler; it is the line for the northern suburbs and the only one that stops in North Adelaide.
• Outer Harbor and Grange run west through Bowden, Croydon and Woodville, where they part — Outer Harbor to Port Adelaide and the Lefevre Peninsula, Grange to the beach.

On the map the lines are drawn as railways with every station marked, and each station has its own page listing what is around it. The stations inside the map’s coverage are the inner ones; the lines carry on past the edge.

The tram

Adelaide’s one tram line runs from the Botanic Garden and the Entertainment Centre at Hindmarsh, through the city along North Terrace and King William Street, and out to the beach at Glenelg. In the centre it is the most useful vehicle there is: it links the railway station, the Festival Centre, Rundle Mall, Victoria Square and the Central Market end of town in a straight line, and the city stops are inside the free zone. Beyond South Terrace it becomes the beach line, and the ride to Moseley Square is covered in its own article.

The O-Bahn

The thing newcomers ask about most is the O-Bahn: a guided busway from the edge of the Park Lands at Hackney Road out to Tea Tree Plaza in the north-east, on which ordinary buses run at railway speed on a concrete track, steered by guide wheels. It was built in the 1980s along the Torrens because the north-eastern suburbs had no railway, and it still does the job a railway would. The city end runs through a tunnel under the Park Lands and the interchanges at Klemzig, Paradise and Tea Tree Plaza have proper stations; on the map the corridor is drawn as a busway and the interchanges carry the busway marker.

Buses, and the free ones

Everything else is a bus. The suburban routes fan out from the city along the main roads — Unley Road, The Parade, Prospect Road, Henley Beach Road, Port Road — which is why those roads are also the café strips, and most inner suburbs have a frequent route within a few minutes’ walk. The city itself has free buses that loop the square mile and North Adelaide, and the Adelaide Metro website is the place to check their current routes and names; they have been renamed more than once.

Fares are paid with a metroCARD or, on most services, a contactless bank card, and the same ticket works across train, tram and bus. Adelaide Metro publishes its full timetable as open data, and that feed is what the departures on the map’s station pages are drawn from.

Bikes: Linear Park and the Park Lands

Adelaide is flat until the hills, and its best cycling route is the river. Linear Park follows the Torrens from the coast at Henley Beach, through the western suburbs, across the top of the city past Adelaide Oval and the weir, and on out to the foothills — a shared path the whole way, off the road and under trees for most of it. It crosses the map from west to east, and on the map it is the green thread through the middle of everything.

Around the centre the Park Lands trail rings the square mile and North Adelaide, which means you can circle the city on paths without meeting a traffic light. The bike lanes on Frome Street and the city’s grid do the rest. Bikes are carried on trains, which turns a long ride into a one-way trip — check Adelaide Metro’s current rules for peak hours and for the tram before relying on it.

Every station, tram stop and O-Bahn interchange on this page is marked on the map; open the card for any of them to see what is trading around it.