Hi Paul,
I was coming down to Adelaide every few weeks and it did not take me long to
come to the realization that the calm, measured pace of life could easily trim
years off a man's life.
I will give you three examples.
When one is new to Adelaide, you will be driving to some destination downtown
and when you are close, but not quite there, you spot a parking space and instinctively
grab it. You then walk the 50m to your destination just to be dismayed to find
there were half a dozen empty spots out front. The anxiety and stress builds
as you ponder whether to go back and move the car right out front. Of course,
after a while, you grow use to being able to park nearly anywhere you want and
before you know it, you are hardly walking anywhere. Also with the $25 in your
wallet that you would have normally required to pay for parking in Sydney, you go
for the double chocolate mud cake for dessert and the lack of exercise and excess
calories quickly lead to chest pains after a few days there.
The lack of traffic and in particular tunnels results in the average Adelaide commuter
getting a tiny fraction of their daily intake of hydrocarbons compared to his Sydney
counterpart. Carbon, as we all know it, is the building block of all life.
Here in Sydney, a slow grind through the Eastern Distributor or M5 East tunnels provides
spades of ethylene, benzene, propene, cyclopentene and methybenzene delivered
straight to the lungs for maximum adsorption and then onto the cellular level
to do their stuff. Don't be surprised if the next evolutionary step in mankind
comes out of Sydney, where the mutations to the DNA will give rise to motorists
with X-Men superpowers.
Finally, as authorities have warned us, speed kills. In Adelaide, at one any one instant,
one is more likely to be doing the gazetted speed
limit. This includes daredevil speeds of 60km/h. If one is driving at such
a speed in downtown Adelaide, tries to dodge a snake crossing the street and
runs into a gum tree, the outcome is almost always fatal. In Sydney though,
they are much smarter, ensuring that you can only drive on roads such as Ryde
Road in the morning at a more sensible 3km/h. Even in the scenario
of a rear-end collision, the results will simply be a bent bumper. Rather than
someone having to die, the Sydney system is much fairer and much more egalitarian.
Whether you are an open heart surgeon that is remunerated thousands of dollars an hour
trying to get to his next operation or a school mum just dropping off the kids in the
Cherokee, everyone gets to where they are going at exactly the same time and 200,000
people each lose one hour of their lives rather than the token sacrifice approach
favoured in less populated cities.
So think carefully. Dark skies may be more abundant and more accessible in Adelaide,
but the equanimity of the place can take years of your life in the most insidious of
ways, without you being aware of it.
Take care!
I've spent about half a year in total (spread out over 5 years) living in Adelaide and I'd have to agree to with Paul - quality of life is very good. It makes me chuckle when the locals complain about the traffic there... what I've seen is still better than Brisbane's main thoroughfares during typical rush hour 
