Melbourne sees longest life expectancy among Australian cities: data

CANBERRA, Dec. 8 (Xinhua) -- Melburnians have the longest life expectancy of people living in any major Australian city, a comprehensive government report has found.

The government's smart cities project studied 80,000 people from Australia's 22 biggest cities.

The data was released on Friday with the life expectancy of the average Melbourne residents found to be 83.7 years.

Melbourne was also found to have the second highest rate of people taking public transport to work at 15.5 percent, behind only Sydney at 22.7 percent.

However, traffic in Australia's two biggest cities prevented them from being "30 minute cities" with 60 percent of people in Melbourne being able to get to work within half an hour by car and 58.2 percent in Sydney, the two worst rates of the cities studied.

Seven cities were found to have 100 percent of jobs accessible by car within 30 minutes, the biggest of which was the New South Wales (NSW) city of Wollongong which has a population of 280,000.

Melbourne was ranked as the top educational performer in the country with 66 percent of residents having finished secondary school and 27 percent possessing a university degree.

Sydney and Melbourne were comfortably the worst-performing cities for housing affordability.

The data was compiled by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to provide governments on all levels with a comprehensive understanding of the nation's biggest cities.

"It's not a matter of one city being better than another," Angus Taylor, Assistant Minister for Cities, said in a media release on Friday.

"It's a matter of them having different attributes and therefore different challenges and opportunities that need to be addressed.

"Customising solutions for individual cities is crucial and a national government has to be part of that."

Darwin in the Northern Territory (NT) had the highest median household income at 84,000 U.S. dollars per year while Tasmania's Launceston was worst-off with 42,330 U.S. dollars per year while also having the lowest number of people per household on average.

Melbourne's population was recorded as 4.73 million people with an annual growth rate of 2.67 percent with its population expected to exceed that of Sydney by 2030. Enditem