Not so liveable?

Port Melbourne performs surprisingly poorly in The Age's new ranking of Melbourne's 314 suburb's "liveability", coming in at 132nd place. Despite being very well appointed in the criteria of coastline, proximity to the CBD, and eating out, it would appear that Chadstone is a better place to live. Really. Interestingly our neighbours faired rather better:

#29 Albert Park
#39 St Kilda
#47 South Melbourne
#61 Middle Park

The lacklustre performance is perhaps explained by the large area deemed to be covered by the suburb, which includes all of the, distinctly less liveable, industrial area North of the Williamstown Road...

The scores in each of the 14 categories appear to be as below. No surprise that we don't get marks for undulating terrain, harder to understand however how we score higher on trains than trams:

• Coastline - 5
• Eating out - 5
• Proximity to CBD - 5
• Culture - 5
• Shops - 4 (vs 5 for Albert Park!)
• Trains - 3 (vs 4 for Albert Park!)
• Open space - 2 (vs 5 for Albert Park)
• Buses - 2 (vs 0 for Albert Park)
• Trams - 2 (vs 4 for Albert Park)
• Crime - 1 (vs 2 for Albert Park)
• Traffic - 1 (vs 0 for Albert Park)
• Trees - 1 (vs 2 for Albert Park)
• Hills - 0
• Schools - 0 (vs 3 for Albert Park)

The most liveable suburb of the world's most liveable city is apparenty South Yarra, which scores just as highly as Port Melbourne on coastline and proximity to the CBD, but is ranked much better on schools, trees and trams.