In the small New South Wales town of Cassilis, the great energy transition has arrived not as a distant promise but as a daily rumble of oversized trucks on the Golden Highway. To protect a community of 300 from the collision of rural scale and industrial demand, the state government has deployed an adaptive intersection system that reads approaching traffic and briefly slows the highway — a quiet experiment in whether intelligent infrastructure can absorb what blunt engineering cannot. The 12-month trial asks an old question in a new form: when progress passes through someone else's backyard,