But it wasn’t until she began working with TriMet, the city’s transport agency, that she became a true believer.

Today, more than a decade on from her early dealings with trams and buses, she is heading Canberra’s first light rail project, bringing with her the experience she gained from one of the world’s most celebrated tram systems.

But she says her awakening was some time coming.

“My first degree is in environmental engineering... and I hadn't really given transport much of a thought,” she says, over green tea at a cafe near the Northbourne Avenue offices of Transport Canberra in Dickson.

“But then when I started working with TriMet in Portland, it didn't take more than a few months and I got it.”

Portland’s light rail network carried the slogan “How we get there matters”, and all around her, Oldfield could see evidence of how public transport had the ability to define a city.

“You'll see it in all the marketing about Portland, it's part of who it is. Between bus and light rail, it's pretty easy to get around and easy to understand the system,” she says.

The light rail was first introduced in Portland in the late 1980s, amid controversy and negative campaigns related to the allocated funding, and which initiatives were dropped in favour of putting the system in place.

“It was money that was supposed to go to a highway, and went to light rail instead, so there were a lot of negative feelings about it, concerns, worries,” she says.

“From the first day it opened, it was and has been incredibly popular. It's part of Portland's identity.”

By the time she arrived, the system was well established and expanding rapidly. During her 11 years there, from she worked on three different light rail projects, in varying roles.

“I did some of the preliminary design myself, managed the designers, managed the contractor, worked with operations, worked with the maintenance staff, the customer experience, the community staff to get it launched,” she said.

It was early on, just six months into her long stint, that she had her lightbulb moment. She was onsite, in full construction garb, when a man came up to her to thank her for what she was doing.

“He said, ‘Thank you, you're going to change my life, this is going to make my day so much better’. And it all came together,” she says.

“You don't really recognise the power that you have. And that guy has no idea that what he said influenced the rest of my trajectory.”

She now sees her job as influencing how people move through a city, and how this movement feeds into the way a city functions.

“It was thrilling. It's really exciting for a lot of reasons. The ultimate outcome is really important, but each day is a different day,” she said.

“Since light rail is so integral to the community, and it's so closely tied to the neighbourhoods, that's a really important feature too, because it's working with the public, and it's understanding that what you're building is going to be in their backyard.

“You know that you're building something that people are going to be interacting with every day, so it's really important to get all that right. It's heaps exciting.”

Her speech is now peppered with Australianisms like “heaps”; having lived in Australia for the past seven years, she and her family are here for the long haul. She first visited Adelaide for a professional exchange in 2007, and when a job came up in that city’s light rail network in 2011, it seemed an obvious move. Her husband, an urban planner, was able to find work in the same area.

“There was so much that I learned in Portland about how to do it right, about how to build something that leaves a better place. We used to joke that Portland was called ‘Practically Perfect Portland’,” she says.

“The thing that you want to do is take what you've learned and bring it to a new place that's looking for some of those lessons. Not to rebuild Portland specifically, because everywhere needs to be its own place and have their own identity, but some of the building blocks and the functional aspects of what you learn, you can apply in any different place.”

Ultimately, the Adelaide project to extend the tram network didn’t eventuate, but she worked for several years within the transport directorate.

“Initially we thought it will a two-year contract and it will be really interesting and we'll try something new, and I knew I liked Adelaide before,” she says.

“It didn't take long and we got permanent residency and citizenship, had kids. It's such a perfect place to live, Australia's really fantastic. It's got all the balances right.”

When the job managing Canberra’s light rail project came up last year, it made perfect sense to take it.

“I've only been here about a year, so the project was well underway, but it was still an opportunity to influence how it was implemented,” she says.

She maintains that even for a chronically car-dependent city like Canberra, it’s never too late to change.

“I think one of the things that's really exciting about working in the directorate that I'm in at the moment is that there's so much positive, progressive thinking about how to make the change, and how to set the city up for where it's going to be in future years,” she says.

She has lived in various American cities in which cars dominate the roads, and public transport isn’t a priority, and says Canberra is well placed to start changing its ways.

“It's about making sure that you do provide the frequent, reliable, dependent service, which is what these plans for high-capacity routes are. But it’s not just ‘build it and they will come’,” she says.

“It's ‘build it and then tell people’. Tell them it's there, tell them it's reliable, tell them and give them all those reasons, remind them of their environmental focus, remind them about health benefits, remind them about cost of living, think about the city as you want it to be.”

The psychological benefits of permanence will play an important role once the network is up and running, but for the time being, there’s excitement enough in just seeing the tramlines suddenly curving onto Northbourne Avenue from one day to the next.

“It's really rewarding. I can imagine for someone from Canberra who’s lived here for quite a period of time, it would be quite a unique and exciting experience, because it's saying, ‘This is coming and happening, and this is real, and before we know it it'll be there’.”