Friday, August 17, 2012

Melbourne - We Win Again

We may have missed out on more gold medals than we expected from the Olympics but my home town of Melbourne has been proclaimed the world's most livable city for the second year running. As readers know, we love our experiences with France but we can't help but to agree with whoever confirms these results.


Hopping off the plane after a most enjoyable holiday in our second favorite country, always brings a feeling of how fortunate we are to live in Melbourne. Sure we have our negatives like any other country and we can be critical of Melbourne in many ways.
I complain about the peak hour traffic when traveling to work but I've found a solution - I go to my study and login to work - do some emails, quotes and orders. After that, I hop in the car and halfway to work I stop for (as I did today) a coffee and a croissant filled with ham, cheese and tomato. Melbourne is the supremo city of coffee and cafes. Honestly, it is!!! We have the best Cafe culture.
Then there's restaurants. I had a friend from Paris staying recently and he and his wife commented on how much better they preferred Melbourne restaurants compared to Paris.

There are various criteria for the judging of the most livable city but a few are stability, culture, infrastructure.
Now I never travel on public transport so I can't comment but stability and culture I can. Australia and Melbourne have never had major conflicts to speak of - sure there was the Eureka stockade, then there was the Vietnam protests by our students but there's never anything violent where lives on a major scale are lost. OK, we have the occasional murder but its usually within the underworld.

Infrastructure - well the government has built some nice freeways so I can get to work but we still do not  have a railway going to our International Airport. We've recently introduced a new ticketing system but the Paris Metro is pretty good by our standards.
The fact that we have five Australian capital cities in the top 20 most livable cities in the world has a lot of kudos for the land down under.
Adelaide is my second favorite Australian city which came in 5th. The others were Sydney 7th, Perth 9th and Brisbane 20th. Not bad, hey?

There's a lot of people out there that agree with me - I love "Melbourne Our Home by the Bay".

                                     2012     Overall    2011    Rank
City                Country          Rank      Rating    Rank  Change

Melbourne           Australia           1        97.5       1       0
Vienna              Austria             2        97.4       2       0
Vancouver           Canada              3        97.3       3       0


 


10 comments:

  1. Cool, isn't it :)

    I do use and love our public transport. The green trams gliding through the centre of our main roads have a great part to play in Melbourne's No. 1 rating: our city's low pollution, good environmental care and sound transport infrastructure.

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    1. A quirk of fate being born in Melbourne - How luck are we?

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  2. You make Melbourne sound very attractive and tempting. :)

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    1. Wouldn't live any where else but love to see all those other lovely historical places in France and Italy.

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  3. We have seen Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane and Cairns but never made it to Melbourne. Seems like it is our loss :-( Diane

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    1. Well if ever you return to Australia, remember - you have friends here. You must tell us of your Aussie travels by email - like to hear.

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  4. Melbourne looks to be a very attractive city and I am sure that your good weather helps.

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    1. CW - today our weather is crap. But winters up north and summers down south in Melbourne is the answer to many of the Grey Nomads.

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  5. I am not surprised. Australia is a great country and not too crowded too. You are very lucky!

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    1. Nadege - when I came to race bikes in California 1979, Australia had a population of maybe 12M, now we are a little over 20M with 3M in Melbourne. I guess it is all relative but I liked it when we were half the population of today. Still I could have been born in China or India.
      We don't know how lucky we are.

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