Tag Archives: sydney

Adjusting from Sydney to Wellington

It’s a been a good few months back home in Wellington, getting settled back into the city and organising catch ups with old friends. It’s also been a very busy couple months, with me getting straight back into work and projects, as well as looking for a house to buy with Lisa!

Obligatory couplesy photo. I should really take better ones of these…

I’m happy to be home here in New Zealand, certainly loving the climate and the lifestyle a lot more than Sydney, although there are certainly a number of things I miss from/about Sydney.

The most noticeable change is that I’m feeling healthier and fitter than ever before, probably on account of doing a lot more physical activity, wandering around the city and suburbs on foot and climbing up hills all the time. The lower pollution probably isn’t bad either – by international scales Sydney is a “clean” city, but when compared to a small New Zealand city, it was very noticeably polluted and I can smell the difference in air quality.

Being only a short distance from the outdoors at all times is a pretty awesome perk of being home. Once I get a car and a mountain bike, a lot more will open up to me, currently I’ve just invested in some good walking boots and have been doing close wanders to the city like Mt Kaukau, up over Roseneath and around Miramar Peninsula.

Wind turbines, rolling hills, sunlight... wait, this isn't a data center!

Wind turbines, rolling hills, sunlight… wait, this isn’t a data centre! What’s wrong with me?? Why am I here?

The other very noticeable difference for me has been my work lifestyle. Moving from working in the middle of the main office for a large company to working semi-remotely from a branch office is a huge change when you consider the loss of daily conversation and informal conversations with my colleagues in the office, as well as the ease of being involved in incidents and meetings when there in person.

Work battle station. Loving the dual vertical 24″ ATM, but I lose them in a week when we move to the new office. :'(

The Wellington staff I work with are awesome, but I do miss the time I spent with the operational engineers in Sydney. Working with lots of young engineers who lived for crazy shit like 10 hour work days then spending all evening at the pub arguing about GNU/Linux, Ruby code, AWS, Settlers of Catan and other important topics was a really awesome experience.

Wellington also has far fewer of my industry peers than Sydney, simply due to it’s scale. It was a pretty awesome experience bumping into other Linux engineers late at night on Sydney streets, recognised as one of the clan by the nerdy tshirt jokes shared between strangers. And of course Sydney generally has far more (and larger) meetups and what I’d describe as a general feel of wealth and success in my field – people are in demand, getting rewarded for it, and are generally excited about all the developments in the tech space.

Not that you can’t get this in Wellington – but the scale is less. Pay is generally a lot lower, company sizes smaller, and customer bases small… there aren’t many places in New Zealand where I could work and look after over a thousand Linux servers serving millions of unique visitors a day for example.

I personally don’t see myself working for any New Zealand companies for a while, at this current point in time, I think the smart money for young kiwis working in technology is to spend some time in Australia, get a reputation and line up some work you can bring home and do remotely. New Zealand has a lot of startups, as well as the traditional telcos and global enterprise integrators, but the work I’ve seen in the AU space is just another step up in both challenge and remuneration. Plus they’re crying out for staff and companies are more willing to consider more flexible relationships and still pay top dollar.

It’s not all negative of course – Wellington still has a good number of IT jobs, and in proportion to other lines of work, they pay very well still – you’re never going to do badly working domestically. Plus there’s the fact that Wellington is home to a hotbed of startup companies including the very successful Xero which has gone global… Longer term I hope a lot of these hopeful companies succeed and really help grow NZ as a place for developing technology and exporting it globally whilst still retaining NZ-based head offices, giving kiwis a chance to work on world-class challenges.

Moving home means I’ve also been enjoying Wellington’s great food and craft beer quite a bit, and I’m probably spending more here than in Sydney on brunch, dinners, coffee and of course delicious craft beer. Hopefully all the walking around the hills of Wellington compensates for it!

Sydney is known for being an expensive place to live, but I’m finding Wellington is much more expensive for coffee and food. The upside is that the general quality and standard is high, whereas I’d find Sydney quite hit and miss, particularly with coffee.

I suspect the difference is due to the economy of scale – if you have a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop in Sydney, you’ll probably serve 100x as many people as you will in Wellington, even after paying higher rents, it works out in your favour. Additionally essential foods are GST free, which makes them instantly 15% less than in New Zealand.

Doesn't get more kiwi than chocolate fish

Doesn’t get more kiwi than complementary chocolate fish with your coffee.

The craft beer scene here is also fantastic, I’m loving all the new beers that have appeared whilst I’ve been away, as well as the convenience of being able to pickup single bottles of quality craft beer at the local supermarket. I’ve been enjoying Tuatara, Epic and Stoke heavily lately, however they’re just a fraction of the huge market in NZ that’s full of small breweries as well as brew-pubs offering their own unique local fare.

Delicious pale ale with NZ hops from Tuatara, a very successful craft brewery in the Wellington region.

I’m still amazed at how poor the beer selection was in Sydney’s city bars and bottle stores. It’s bad enough that you can’t buy alcohol at the supermarket, but the bottlestores placed near to them have very little quality craft beer available for selection.

I remember the bottlestore in Pyrmont (Sydney’s densest residential suburb) had a single fridge for “craft” beer which was made up of James Squire’s which is actually a Lion brand masquerading as a craft beer, and Little Creatures which although is quite good, happens to be owned by Lion as well.

Drinking out at the pubs had the same issue, with many pubs offering only brews from C.U.B and Lion and often no craft beers on tap. Sure, there were specific pubs one could go to for a good drink, but they were certainly in the minority in the city, where as Wellington makes it hard not to find good beer.

Just before I left Sydney, The Quarryman opened up in Pyrmont which brought an excellent range of AU beers to a great location near my home and work, however it’s a shame that this sort of pub was generally an infrequent find.

There’s a good write up on the SMH about the relationship between the big two breweries and the pubs, which mentions that the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is looking into the situation – would be nice if some action gets taken to help the craft beers make their way into the pubs a bit more.

I might be enjoying my craft beer a bit *too* much! ;-)

The public transport is also so different back here in Wellington. Being without a car in both cities, I’ve been making heavy use of buses and trains to get around – particularly since I’ve been house hunting and going between numerous suburbs over the course of a single day.

Sydney Rail far beats anything Wellington – or New Zealand for that matter – has to offer. Going from the massive 8 carriage double-decker Sydney trains that come every 3-15mins to Wellington’s single decker 2 carriage trains that come every 30-60mins makes it feel like a hobby railway line. And having an actual conductor come and clip your paper-based ticket? Hilarious! At least Wellington has been upgrading most of it’s trains, the older WW2-era relics really did make it feel like a hobby/historic railway….

No magnetic swipe on this train ticket!

But not everything is better in Sydney on this front – Wellington buses have been a bliss to travel on compared to Sydney, on account of actually having an integrated electronic smartcard system on the majority of buses.

I found myself avoiding buses in Sydney because of their complicated fare structure and as such I tended to infrequently go to places that weren’t on the rail network due to the hassle it entailed. Whereas in Wellington, I can jump on and off anything and not have to worry about calculating the number of sections and having the right type of ticket.

The fact that Sydney is *still* working on pushing out smartcards in 2014 is just crazy when you think about the size of the city and it’s position on the world stage. Here’s hoping the Opal rollout goes smoothly and my future trips around Sydney are much easier.

Finally the other most noticeable change? It’s so lovely and cold! I seriously prefer the colder climate, although lots of people think I’m nuts for giving up the hot and sunny days of Sydney, but it just feels so much more comfortable to me – I guess I tend to just “run hot”, I’m always pumping out heat… guess it works well for a cold climate. :-)

In event of a Wellington winter, your Thinkpad can double as a heating device.

Bondi to Coogee Walk

Leave a reply

Whilst a famous tourist location, I’m not a huge fan of Bondi Beach – probably primarily due to it being a victim of it’s own success and being overrun by annoying tourists like myself. ;-)

However Bondi isn’t only just a beach, it’s the start of a walkway leading along the coast and down to Coogee and back. The walk winds along the coast, often along the edge of cliffs and through various quieter coves. It’s a nice escape from Sydney city and suburbs and for a short time you can forget you live in a massive sprawling city.

Looking back at Bondi beach.

Mmmm real waves, none of this calm harbour crap

Winter Sydney is a lovely and mild climate, particularly on this overcast and windy day – definitely the best time of the year to go for walking adventures, especially if you’re a manly kiwi who doesn’t think 10 degrees is cold.

For details about the walk, take a look at this site. I found it was easy enough to get the train to Bondi station and then walk to Bondi beach as a warmup instead of waiting around for a bus and it saves a few dollars on the trip cost as well.

Pictures from the Sydney waterfront

1 Reply

This post is a collection of various pictures from around Sydney Harbour that I’ve been collecting as I’ve been here.In my opinion, the waterfront is the best feature of Sydney – the city isn’t wildly exciting to me, it’s a somewhat generic large city, however the waterfront adds some uniqueness and difference to it and there’s always something different taking place on the water.

Sydney CBD and bridge in the hazy distance.

A water ferry cruises through Darling Harbour, near the maritime museum.

View out from Pyrmont towards the Harbour Bridge.

They put everything on barges here... I've seen party barges, crane barges, cement mixer barges even a soccer field barge (!!).

They put everything on barges here… I’ve seen party barges, crane barges, cement mixer barges, a soccer field barge and even a barge full of strippers and sleazy bankers. :-/

Sydney's military port - I really want to find out what they use that massively bulky crane to lift - tanks maybe?

Royal Australian Navy’s primary dock – I really want to find out what they use that massively bulky crane to lift – tanks maybe?

One of the smaller ferries comes in to dock at Circular Quay.

Pulling away from Circular Quay on the Manly Ferry

Bow before Lord Carr and his mighty duck army!

Mysterious discharge from a mysterious pipe slung under a pier.

Looking out towards Pyrmont as the sun sets.

Sydney CBD to Manly

2 Replies

Since living in Sydney, I’ve been out to Manly a couple times, including for a walk around the North Head trails which showcase some of Australia’s military history and fortifications.

Manly has a lot going for it, offering great beaches, walking trails and a strong ecosystem of different shops and food venues. And with easy access from Circular Quay via a scenic 30minute ferry ride, it’s a great day outing for me, especially since Circular Quay is only a 20min walk from my flat.

One thing I have noticed on my ferry trips out to Manly, is that there’s a lot of scenic bush and bays all along the North Sydney coast time from the Sydney Harbour Bridge right out to Manly. I therefore decided to make Sydney CBD to Manly my next walking adventure in Sydney.

Of course, those readers familiar with Sydney will say – “but Jethro, that’s nuts, Manly is miles away!”. Well dear reader, I can confirm for you – Manly is a painstaking 30.04km pain-inducing death-march from Sydney CBD, and I even have the GPS trail for you to follow if you wish to re-create this pain in your own life. :-)

View Walk from Sydney CBD to Spit Point Bridge in a larger map

It’s an extremely interesting walk, along the way you pass through opulent suburbs, the back of Sydney Zoo, numerous coves and beaches, a number of hills, bush, WW2 fortifications and two major bridges.

Please excuse the line breakage on the map – Google Track didn’t handle some GPS plot absences particular well, I’ve touched up as best as I can, but couldn’t figure out a way to connect segmented lines. There’s also the period from Spit Point Bridge to Manly itself where my phone battery died, so I’ve drawn in the lines to a mostly-accurate level, but it messes with the total distance stats reported and leaves some weird graphic artefacts.

It’s best viewed in the full Google Maps interface – I’ve tagged certain areas of interest, it’s also worth noting the location of Ferry docks, since there’s a number of good attractions that you may wish to ferry out directly to go and see.

I took a few photos along the way – the trip is very scenic, I really need to go back with a DSLR as I came across heaps of different things I would have loved to capture in a better level of quality.

Sadly Lisa didn’t want to join me on this walk for some strange reason, so you’ll have only pictures of pained geek and scenary, rather than any actual eye candy from my trip photos:

Full of optimism, I set forth from my apartment with my trust RedHat t-shirt to bring geek culture to the bush.

The first stage of the walk is through Sydney CBD and over the Sydney Harbour Bridge – I have plenty of photos from a previous walk across if you’re interested. The bridge is always an interesting stroll and only takes a couple minutes offering amazing views the whole time.

Once off the bridge in Milsons Point, the walk took me through the suburbs and coves directly around North Sydney. The area is certainly wealthy, but there’s odd pockets of housing or apartments that appear otherwise.

The whole route is littered with small coves and marinas like this one.

Looking out back towards Sydney

Amusingly odd to have man made items pushing their way through the path, rather than tree roots.

The walk through these suburbs is nice enough, but the real gold starts once the beach and coastline tracks start, these offer a much desired escape from the city noise and people and some amazing views of the harbour and Sydney itself.

City looks pretty far away already!

The walkways that have been installed behind the Sydney Zoo are particularly good, these paths are well formed and often form wooden stairs and walkways for a good few KM of coastline.

Walking out behind Sydney Zoo towards the ferry dock.

Thankfully the day was overcast and only low 20s, otherwise I’d be looking a lot worse for wear.

A number of trees along the route with this weird base hollowing.

Also a number of trees with this weird growth on them – seems to be too many for them to be beehives… dropbear nests?

Weird bark stripped trees – came around many of these, the trees have all their bark stripped off and lying around them – unsure as to why.

Halfway between the Sydney Zoo and Chowder Bay where the well built Zoo trail ends, there’s Bradley Head, an area of parkland with a small lighthouse and the distinctive tripod mast from the original HMAS Sydney WW1 era ship.

Mast from the HMAS Sydney (1912) WW1 era ship at Bradley’s Head.

Following the coast around from Bradley’s Head and through Chowder Bay, leads to Middle Head, home of the Middle Head Fortifications that guarded Sydney Harbour. With direct line of sight to any ships attempting to pass through Sydney Harbour, it offered an ideal defensive location, featuring both cannon and disappearing guns – similar to the ones in Devonport NZ, however there’s no longer any guns located at Middle Head.

View out from Middle Head towards Sydney Heads, the entrance to Sydney Harbour.

10 points if you spot the balloon tagged body.

Old fortifications: everyone loves lying around in them with a balloon tied to their body.

Unsure if this was a half-assed demolition job, or whether the building broke apart over the years.

Exercised geek - at this point I was still feeling pretty good.

Geek, with exercise add-on. At this stage I was feeling a little tired, but still needed to head down to Hunters Bay, and then back up a big hill before I could then go down across Spit Point Bridge.

There’s quite a bit of stuff to explore out at Middle Head, it’s something that I’ll have to make another visit to in future to properly explore – there’s no quick ferry route to Middle Head, closest terminals appear to be either the zoo dock, which will require a few more KM of (pleasant) walking.

Walking down towards Spit Point Bridge. Just about every cove I see has a marina situated in it, must be almost as many boats as cars in Sydney.

Walking down towards Spit Bridge. Just about every cove I see has a marina situated in it, must be almost as many boats as cars in Sydney.

The walk along Spit Rd to the Spit Bridge isn’t particularly great, as it’s a main road (2x 2-lanes roads) the way down, so this section of walk has all the charms of walking alongside a motorway, however it’s the only way across (short of swimming).

Spit Point Bridge! I just managed to run across as the lights were flashing before it started lifting.

I fucking love bridges!

Around this time my phone decided it didn’t want to handle more than 4 hours doing GPS track plotting and died, so the remainder of my walk to Manly has been drawn in manually on the Google Map above.

There is a coastal route the whole way from Spit Point Bridge to Manly, at about 10km. Having already done 22km by this stage and it getting late, I decided to cut back across some of the suburbs, rather than finding my way though the unfamiliar suburbs and do a shorter 7km trip.

In hindsight I should have continued up Spit Rd and onto Sydney Rd, taking the coast path part of the way made the walk back up to join Sydney Rd longer and harder than it needed to be.

Pain, oh god the pain. In some ways it was good that my phone died, so that pictures of me looking even worse couldn’t be taken.

I’m keen to do the proper Spit Bridge to Manly walk, so maybe I’ll make that segment a separate trip one day, or if I’m ever crazy enough, re-try the walk starting from Manly and walking back to the city.

I eventually made it into Manly, rapidly devouring an iced bun (mmm delicious 2000+ kJ energy) and a coke, the champion feed of any athlete (I was out of muesli bars ok!!) and got the ferry back to Circular Quay.

Being able to sit at the stern of the ferry and see all the coves I had walked around during the 30mins ferry journey back was actually incredibly relaxing, certainly a good ending to the trip. The only problem is that the half hour break in walking meant that my body started cooling down and it was not pleasant getting moving once back at Circular Quay.

I managed to strain one of my ankles slightly – the rest of me hurts like crazy, but in the usual exercise way, so it should come right in the next couple of days.

General stats from the trip – I averaged 5.21km/h walking speed – my actual walking speed is more around 5.9km/h, I suspect time spent looking at sights and suburban traffic lights messed with those stats somewhat.

The total distance was 30.5km (some GPS measurement inaccuracies in that of course) – if I was able to keep that rate up daily, I would be able to walk from Wellington to Auckland in one month (of course reality is that there is a lot more time needed for breaks, detors, difficult terrain, etc).

I’d certainly recommend parts of this walk to anyone interested – however you have to be fucking nuts to do the whole thing like I did – I’m still hobbling around my apartment like an old man in pain.

Google Convoy

2 Replies

Spotted this when doing street view around Pyrmont Sydney – there’s at least two Google cars since one has captured this picture, looks like there might even be a third….

The watchers are watching the watchers.

Unsure why there would be a convoy of cars, the few occasions when I’ve seen Google imaging cars in the past, they’ve always been standalone. Having said that, Pyrmont contains Google’s Australian headquarters, so maybe there’s a few special projects on the go.

linux.conf.au 2013 plans

Leave a reply

It’s nearing that important time of year that the NZ-AU open source flock congregate that important and time honoured tradition of linux.conf.au. I’ve said plenty about this conference in the past, going to make an effort to write a lot more this year about the conference.

There’s a bit of concern this year that there might not be a team ready to take up the mantle for 2014, unfortunately linux.conf.au is a victim of it’s own success – as each year has grown bigger and better, it’s at the stage where a lot of volunteers consider it too daunting to take it on themselves. Hopefully a team has managed to put together a credible bid for 2014, it would be sad to lose this amazing conference.

As I’m now living in Sydney, I can actually get to this year’s conference via a business class coach service which is way cheaper than flying, and really just as fast once taking the hassles of getting to the airport, going through security and flying into account. Avoiding the security theatre is a good enough reason for me really – I travel a lot, but I actually really hate all the messing about.

If you’re attending the conference and departing from Sydney (or flying into Sydney from NZ to then transfer to Canberra), I’d also suggest this bus service – feel free to join me on my booked bus if you want a chat buddy:

Depart Sydney, Sunday 27th Jan at 11:45 on bus GX273.
Depart Canberra, Saturday 2nd Feb at 14:00 on bus GX284.

The bus has WiFi and power and extra leg room, so should be pretty good if you want to laptop the whole way in style – for about $35 each way.

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Leave a reply

On one of our trips down to Circular Quay, we recently discovered the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

It’s a free museum with a range of interesting and unique exhibits and worth visiting if you have a couple of hours time to spare – since it’s right on Circular Quay it’s really easy to get to, plus it’s also right by The Rocks which is worth a visit.

Circular Quay area

This is what happens when you erect scaffolding in a flight path…

Mail order plane anyone?

OCD alcoholism: drunken night of beer bottle smashing followed by having to re-assemble them all again.

This is a visual representation of my inbox.

This is a visual representation of emails pouring into my inbox. :-/

At what stage are artists just really taking the piss?

The colour! OMG!

The best work of art in the whole place :-P

Of course not all of Sydney is as excited about artwork….

Is this sign art itself?

The MCA was a really good visit, well worth checking out if you have time in Sydney – plus it’s free, which is a miracle for Sydney really. ;-)

Based on how much I enjoyed MCA, I’m even more keen to make a trip down to Tasmania in the near future to go visit MONA – I sadly missed it on my last trip as it hadn’t quite opened at that stage, but hearing lots of awesome stuff about it.

Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum

Leave a reply

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney is a science/tech/design museum offering a range of exhibits including space, robotics, history, fashion and other geeky and design related topics.

I went there on a special event day so the usual $12 entrance fee had been halved (yay!) and spent a few hours having a good look around the museum.

No tech museum would be complete without a steam exhibit – the powerhouse actually has some of the engines in a powered state, although there wasn’t a whole lot going on when I was there.

Before data centers, these were the power houses of industry.

Before data centers, these were the power houses behind the world’s industry.

Old destination board from a railway station.

The man walking in front of a steam engine with a red flag to limit it’s speed seems about as hopeless as the RIAA/MPAA wanting to stop digital downloads…. you can’t restrict new technology for long.

There’s also a good exhibit of space technology, including an actual F-1 rocket engine, the most powerful liquid fuelled rocket ever developed and the machine responsible for powering the Saturn V which took humanity to the moon.

(from the left) F-1 rocket engine, a sounding rocket (research), several models of famous space craft and satellites and more.

F-1 Engine! These things are NOT small!

$\m/ squeeeee$

\m/ :-D

Rocket thruster used in command modules.

1/3 scale Soyuz pair coupled together.

Retro computer inside the space station module mockup.

Replica Mars Rover – The Soviets sure made some weird looking hardware.

There are a range of robotics exhibits, including some neat demonstrations of industrial robotic arms that are bit more uncommon to see.

All hail the robotic overlords!

Everyone loves hexapods!

Plus a bunch of other random bits:

Weird looking aircraft

Electrifying Touch

At times the selection of exhibits feels a bit disjointed, things certainly don’t flow quite as well as some of the other science and technology museums I’ve been to and some areas a bit worn and dated – having said that, they are in the process of renovations, so it might be fairer to re-evaluate it in a year or so.

That being said, it’s worth a visit, just for some of the awesomeness they have there – plus how often can you take a picture of you and your partner standing underneath an F1 rocket engine? :-)

Houston, set engines to snuggly!

Bondi Beach

Leave a reply

Seeing as I’m living in Sydney, I felt compelled to head out to visit Bondi Beach – it’s a pretty famous location, so figured it’s worth getting out there to check it out at least once.

All set up for a day at the beach, geek style!

Getting out to Bondi is a bit of a mission, since unfortunately the rail link doesn’t go the whole way – instead you catch the train to Bondi Junction, and then switch to bus in order to get to the beach.

You can buy a (pricey) ticket at any of the city train station machines that includes both the train and bus fare – costing about $8.80 return at an off-peak time.

The bus is the worst part of the trip, in future I’ll probably consider just walking it as it’s only 3.2km from the railway station – whilst the buses *do* have air con, any benefits are lost with the squeeze with numerous tourists squished into it, personally I’d rather be hot outside than hot squeezed into a metal tin with random strangers….

Bondi Beach. It has sand. Waves. Usual beach things really.

People are really the biggest issue with Bondi – it’s a nice beach in it’s own right, but the volume of tourists and shops around it kind of ruins the enjoyment somewhat, particularly when combined with the transport hassles. In summer the crowds can be massive, as much as 30 thousand+ – and it’s not a particularly large beach really.

The smaller beaches in walking distance to the south like Tarramara and Bronte look more appealing if you’re more of an introverted type, or take the ferry over to Manly for some of the nice beaches over there.

If you’re a tourist on holiday, you’re probably better off spending your time in Sydney to explore the city and waterfront and save the beach trips for when visiting Brisbane’s gold coast.

Having said that, if you’re in Sydney and don’t mind lots of people, it’s a nice beach and looks great for swimming and surfing, plus it’s well patrolled by surf life savers.

One of the perks of Bondi Beach is being able to meet pretty ladies. Although they won’t always appreciate you taking pictures of them. ;-)

Aside from the beach, there are a large number of eateries along the beach and in the surrounding streets – (like Funky Pies for some delicious vegetarian/vegan goodness), as well as a walk up over the rocky cliffs.

Walkway from the southern end of Bondi Beach.

Looking back at Bondi

It was worth the visit, but I don’t think Bondi will become one of my regular visited locations, the transport hassles make it a bit difficult to get there – it’s easier for me to get out to Manly on the ferry than it is to get to Bondi on the train/bus.

It would be a different story if living locally or having a private transport option- some of my colleagues at work get there by bike which seems to work quite well for them.

Light Rail of Sydney

Leave a reply

Ending up living in Sydney rather than Melbourne has brought one unfortunate side effect – a lack of awesome trams spread around the city. Thankfully it turns out one doesn’t have to go all the way to Melbourne just to get a light rail fix.

Sydney has two forms of light rails – the monorail which is to be decommissioned in 2013 and the more recent tram link that runs from Central station, through Pyrmont and out into Glebe.

mmmmmm light rail here, light rail there, light rail everywhere!

I haven’t been on the Sydney trams yet, based on the location of my apartment, central station and my office in Pyrmont, the tram tends to take me away from the direction I want to actually travel in – although that being said it may be useful if I ever want to go quickly from work to Central station and then transit onto the commuter rail network.

I’m hoping that Sydney considers adopting more light rail – whilst the commuter rail network is very effective at linking main centers, there’s a lot of Sydney that’s only linked by buses, which aren’t particularly fast and seem to be at their limits in regards to capacity.

Extending the tram lines out to places like Surry Hills and Bondi would be a huge plus, the linking of commuter rail and light rail has been very successful for Melbourne and there’s no reason why it couldn’t be replicated here as well.