Don’t make the mistake of challenging Sharath Mahendran’s claim that he can name all of Sydney’s highways. He can do it all right.
“The A1 is the Pacific Highway; the M2 is the Hills Motorway; the A3 is Centenary Drive; the M4 is the Western Motorway; the M5 is the South Western Motorway,” he begins rattling off. “Do you want me to keep going?
Sharath Mahendran, the 21-year-old behind the hit Sydney YouTube channel Building Beautifully, at Chatswood Interchange - his favourite planned space in Sydney.Credit: Flavio Bracaleone
His knowledge reflects his passion – and people are taking notice: the 21-year-old is emerging as one of the more significant people shaping how Sydneysiders think about their city.
On his YouTube channel Building Beautifully, less than two years old, he has built up 30,000 subscribers and gained hundreds of thousands more views. He’s attracted praise for his videos that stretch in interest from the design flaw that makes Town Hall Station so confusing to navigate and the sad history of the city’s monorail to Sydney’s most infuriating roundabout and – one of his most popular uploads – the enduring problem of Sydney’s “stroads”, or street roads.
His success is not without effort: each video can take up to 30 hours to write, film and edit. And in his dedication to exploring the city’s rail lines he even found himself being kicked out of a little-known train station.
“I cannot believe that many people want to listen to me,” he tells me over a mocha at Chatswood Interchange, his favourite planned section of Sydney. “It’s an absolute honour. Like, it’s an extreme honour.”
Mahendran grew up in West Pennant Hills, “a very suburban upbringing”. The big backyards and cars galore had an impact on him, but not as much as his grandfather’s GPS.
“He had this TomTom in his car, and that was my version of the iPhone,” he says. “I’d scroll through the maps on his TomTom and just got so obsessed with them. I started to memorise them all.”
He began spending hours on the simulation game Cities: Skylines, where he created a fake city’s transport network from scratch.
“At first I would just focus on the roads, but then I realised that to be good at the game you needed to build good metro systems. That built an awareness of … metros and trains and how to create good networks. And that’s when I started to research the real world.”
Sydney’s urban planning: the good, according to Building Beautifully
- Chatswood: It’s so well integrated with its train station, there’s a healthy amount of density with plenty of dining, shopping and entertainment options.
- Rhodes: Basically the same as Chatswood, with the added plus that it was formerly a contaminated industrial site. How amazing that they’ve turned it into such a vibrant, dense waterfront district!
- Castle Hill: It turned itself from a car-centric to more walkable place. They pedestrianised Old Northern Road, redirected traffic around the CBD, added a high-capacity metro which links to Castle Towers, and built lots of density. Brilliant!
Graduating James Ruse Agricultural High School with a 99.80 ATAR, Mahendran began studying medicine at Western Sydney University. It took him three years to realise it wasn’t a natural fit, and so left that to study civil engineering.
“[Medicine] wasn’t … what I was actually passionate about. I felt like I had so much to say about what Sydney was like but I didn’t have any way to say it. So, I was like, ‘You know what? I’ll make a YouTube channel’.”
The first video on the channel was a detailed, 14-minute examination of Eastwood in the city’s northwest as an accidental pedestrian paradise.
Since that first upload in January 2022, his popularity has soared – and his planning interests have sharpened.
Sydney’s urban planning: the bad, according to Building Beautifully
- Carlingford: I’m of the view that there’s too much density here – I’m all for density, don’t get me wrong – but the there are massive, massive towers next to a light rail stop which has lower capacity than trains and doesn’t even go to the city. There are no shops, no restaurants. It’s silly.
- Denistone: Such good train access to the city and yet there’s nothing but freestanding houses around the station. Public transport isn’t a privilege, it’s a right.
- Camden: Camden used to have a train line, but they closed it in 1963, right when the LGA was growing in population. What a mistake!
“I’m just really passionate about the ways that we let Sydney grow in the decades to come,” he says. “As someone who doesn’t live within walking distance of a station, I think we especially need to be building up around train stations.”
He has since joined the new advocacy group Sydney YIMBY to amplify his view, arguing that building up instead of out is “so obvious to me”.
“I think Sydneysiders need to realise we need to rely more on public transport. Roughly 20 per cent of journeys to work in Sydney are made by public transport. It’s a decent number but we can get that higher.”
What would he do if he was transport minister for a day? His answer is quick: a heavy rail line around the edges of the city, from Norwest to Kogarah.
“One thing that Sydney lacks is circumferential lines. It’s very easy in Sydney to get to Central ... but getting to Parramatta or Hurstville or Penrith is harder because we don’t have those lines that get you between suburbs.”
Boasting a different attitude to the current government – which has been critical of the price tag attached to the Metro West project – Mahendran gives a youthful smile: “It would be extremely expensive,” he admits. “But very worth it.”
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