Brief observations of cycling in Sydney by a foreigner
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After spending a week wandering around Sydney I made several observations about the bike culture there. For 5 days we pretty much walked everywhere, but we also took a bus out to Maroubra Beach to walk up to Bondi Beach, the train out to the Blue Mountains and ferries to the zoo, and Manly beach.
vvill, please educate me on the real story if I step in it at all…
We stayed in a hotel just south of the CBD in Surrey Hills. Highly recommend it if anyone is going soon. Walkable to all the main areas of interest and buses and ferries.
Sydney and surrounding area is hilly! And many of the hills are steep! Possibly due to that, it felt like about half the bikes we saw downtown were e-bikes. There were lots of bike lanes but on some main roads (Oxford St) bikes were relegated to bus lanes as in many cities. In general things seemed to work quite well. I wonder if they’re having the same debate about e-bikes as we are, but in general e-bikes seemed more ingrained already in Sydney.
We didn’t see that many roadies, but they were there, evidenced by the busy Rapha store/Cafe near our hotel. And along those lines, when you factor in the e-bikes almost all of the cyclists we saw were really fast! The e-bikes were fast and the roadies looked like they were racing everywhere they went. The first cyclists we saw were riding a paceline on a 6-lane 80kph motorway heading into the city from the airport. There seemed to be very few big slow dudes like myself.
Sydney has a dockless bike share system. We saw some bikes in REALLY weird places all at the same time I saw via twitter that dockless bikes were being rolled out in DC. This will be interesting! Maybe the weirdest place we saw an abandoned bike was along the cliffs near Coogee Beach about half a mile from the nearest road, or house.
We rented hybrid bikes in Manly Beach to do a couple hours of exploring. The bikes were crap as expected, but riding on the left side of the road was also weirder than I expected. I did a whole bike tour in Scotland and didn’t have any trouble. But for some reason in Australia, I never got used to it. Anti-southern hemisphere bias somehow.
Sydney is the opposite of Seattle. While we were there, the meteorologists were saying that Sydney hadn’t had any significant rain in 16 weeks! People here are freaking out because we haven’t seen rain in like 3 weeks? During our 5 days we saw about 4 clouds. You’ll need sunscreen but probably not the rain jacket.
I also spent a week down in Hobart for a meeting and decided that I want to ride up Mt Wellington sometime. It’s the 4,170 ft mountain that is the backdrop of the city. It’s also home to the world’s hardest half-marathon.
http://www.pointtopinnacle.com.au/#1500378234560-6b2c47ea-06fb. We saw a few cyclists on the lower slopes during a bus tour up to the top but 40F temps, 50mph winds and rain kept them from riding to the top that day. The road is narrow, but drivers expect to see cyclists and runners, so on an off-day might not be so bad?That’s about it! Limited observations from a week in Sydney, Australia. It’s just a beautiful city with awesome things like the blue mountains, and beaches a short bus, ferry, or train ride away.
Oh! They also have flying foxes. Puppy sized bats with 1m wingspan that spend their days sleeping in the tops of trees in the middle of Centennial Park. Definitely worth seeing and possible getting pooed on.
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