Multi-tasking, missed turns and musings in Sydney

As I was trying to navigate my rental car through the motorway and tunnel network, my wife and I started talking about how many years Sydney might be ‘ahead of Auckland’. Probably not a great time to be multitasking as I missed a turn and ended up in the CBD at 4pm on a Friday…. 

The first question is if it is really ahead. 

You can’t help being wowed when you enter a city like Sydney. The water sparkling under the Harbour Bridge, the sails of the Opera House reflected in the water. A steady stream of trains meeting ferries, thousands of people out and about in the sun in the middle of winter. 

With a population of nearly 5.2 million people, Sydney is fractionally smaller by population than New Zealand. The public transport network appears efficient, with the trains making over a million journeys on a weekday. Those motorway tunnels are impressive, and traffic seems to flow pretty well, even though it is constantly busy with all those people moving about. 

I am sure many of you reading this have spent time in Sydney or one of the other big Australian cities. We spent our time in the Inner West, staying with family and we got a taste of ‘real life’ rather than viewing life from a hotel on Circular Quay. 

I noticed that when I went for a morning run or jog, nobody would make eye contact. Being a friendly Kiwi, I am into my giddays, good mornings, at the least a smile and an eyebrow raise. Not in Sydney mate…. 

I spoke to one of our relatives and he tells me everyone is on edge. Life is a hustle. It’s busy and it’s expensive, and yes the motorways are good but everything takes so long to get to.
Houses are expensive. Rents are high…. 

Kind of sounds like the sort of things someone in Auckland might say. Those same problems are going on over the ditch – cost of living, long commutes, the housing market… 

I read recent accounts of people coming home, back to New Zealand, after time spent in Australia. Some of them are saying the same thing. (Sorry, the link is behind a paywall)

So while I am still mulling over the question, I’m tending to think that while Sydney is bigger, it may well not be ahead of us, and it may not be better. 

But… I think that Australia is a bit like the US. It might just be our ‘land of opportunity’ across the water. There is a drive to expansion and getting on with it. A can do attitude which I am going to try and expand on in next week’s post .
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By the way, as armchair futurists, we decided that it would take about 50 years for Auckland to get to the size and complexity of Sydney. Auckland council is saying by 2050 (26 years) it will reach a population of around 2.5 million.