Travelling around central Sydney will not always be as easy or as pleasant as it was, for many of us, on Tuesday morning.

The nature of big cities is that when space becomes available, it tends to get filled. So George Street has been closed to buses, the buses have been put on new routes through the city and, on Tuesday morning anyway, they ran smoothly and easily.

That will almost certainly change. More CBD workers will start to return from extended long weekends. The weather will turn, cars will run into other cars and traffic lights will malfunction.

There will be plenty of opportunity to be frustrated in the next three years of construction on Sydney's new light rail line from Circular Quay to the eastern suburbs.

But the big difference in Sydney this week is that the changes are at least being made for a reason. When Sydney's buses inevitably start to get clogged again, they will do so on a new pattern of organisation. It is a pattern that creates the capacity for improvement one day – in this case, allowing for the construction of a higher-capacity light rail line through the heart of the city.

The significance of Tuesday morning's bus reorganisation is that it shows these major changes are possible if well managed and well communicated.

There is always more that can be done. Under this new bus plan, more people will have to walk longer distances. The government could make their lives easier by giving pedestrians more generous timing at traffic lights through the city.

And on the evidence of Tuesday morning, there is no need to maintain the absurd absence of a full network of separated cycleways through the city. Let people take a bike to work if they can avoid the bus, train or car, and give them separated cycleways on which to safely ride.

But consider how easy it would have been for the NSW government not to have bothered to try and reorganise the buses – an essential requirement for building a tram line through George Street.

The government could have done what governments have done for decades in Sydney – tried to "improve" public transport by simply putting more buses on the same narrow roads.

Credit, then, to the government for having the guts to try something different and, on the evidence of Tuesday morning, not making an absolute meal of it.

And no credit to Labor and Luke Foley, who stood for election in March promising the people of NSW they would also build a light rail line down George Street.

Now Foley, who says light rail will be a disaster, has to spend the next three years lamenting the absence of buses down George – the main street of central Sydney which finally felt, on Tuesday, like a nice place to be because the buses weren't there.