Getting around: Sydney vs Joburg

One of the best things about Sydney is the fact that I get to ride to work in a boat. No traffic circles, no minibus taxis or BMW drivers (at least, not in their BMWs), twenty minutes chugging across one of the world’s most beautiful harbours: it’s hard to imagine a more pleasant commute.

The challenge of getting around is one of the more obvious contrasts between Jo’burg and Sydney. While you may get around in the hermetically concealed cocoon that is your private car in both, there are important differences. The first and most obvious is, of course, public transport. While many Sydney residents do drive to work in their cars, which is why you can spend up to four hours sitting in traffic jams every day, most residents, depending on where they live, do have a choice.

In South Africa, as we all know, public transport is for the poor, and you are at a very real disadvantage if you don’t have a car, which can mean the difference between landing a job and staying unemployed. Either get up at sparrow poep to climb onto a bus and spend ages getting to your destination, or take your life in your hands and crowd into a taxi (for those who have never experienced taxi travel for themselves, Nthabi Moreosele’s column in The Sowetan is an eye-opener). And if you need to visit clients or travel to meetings during the day, you have to rely on the charity of your more vehicularly-advantaged colleagues.

In Sydney, depending on where you live, you have a choice between bus, train and ferry. If you have any choice in the matter, opt for the ferries. They are great: punctual (most of the time), clean and rarely crowded. Because they service the more expensive suburbs that border the harbour, they tend to carry people who know how to behave in public. How much longer the ferries will be providing this excellent service at reasonable rates is uncertain, since the government is planning to privatise them.

In contrast, the buses are slow and commuters are packed like sardines at rush hour, and the trains are for the most part dirty and crowded, their windows and doors etched with graffiti. Locals love to complain about the state of public transport, in particular the trains, which are often late and unreliable. (Perhaps if they knew how crap public transport was in South Africa, they would be more grateful for what they do have.)

Then there are the taxis. Like Jo’burg, taxis are everywhere in Sydney; here too, they stop wherever they like and to hell with the inconvenience they cause. But, as is the case with New York, the Australian variety boasts sedans — with the odd station wagon or people-mover — and they’re expensive. Poor people can’t afford to ride in taxis here. Travelling to the head office of my client and back costs $80, and paying for cab charges is a huge business overhead here.

Ah, Cabcharge: this is a brilliant system and no business in Sydney can afford to run without it. Unlike South Africa, working people in Sydney typically use taxis and they pay for these using cab charges. This means that employees are able to avoid having to use their own vehicles — with the associated petrol costs and wear and tear — to service clients, and because virtually everyone in Sydney travels to clients using taxis, it’s standard practice.

Indeed, bringing your car into the city makes no financial sense at all. Parking fees here are the third highest in the world. Parking at the Sydney Opera House is popular because it is the cheapest in the CBD, but even then, at $42 for a day, it could soon bankrupt you.

Oh, travelling around Sydney can be frustrating. It means having to live your life according to somebody else’s timetable and it limits your options to living close to a train line, a bus stop or a ferry wharf. The public transport system is not as good as some other first world cities and the sense of independence is something that most South African motorists would struggle to relinquish. But hey — compared to what this Jo’burger is used to — it’s great.