But before the arrival of the couple's second child Lucy, Ms Osborne had a highly skilled specialist role in pre-natal research, working for the Victorian health department. Alice and Jason Osborne in Point Cook, where they live with their children William, 7, and Lucy, 4. Credit:Joe Armao The failure to properly plan Australia's cities – a failure by local, state and federal governments – forced Osborne to make a difficult choice: a great job or her family. She chose her family. The Osbornes are typical of millions of Australian caught on the far side of a new urban divide: between those who live near the centre of our cities and those who live near the outer fringes.

On Monday, the Grattan Institute releases City Limits: Why Australia's Cities are Broken and How We Can Fix Them. The book details how cities like Melbourne have evolved over the last decade. Jobs have concentrated in city centres. Meanwhile affordable housing, particularly for families, has boomed on the city fringes.

The trend has locked in the car as the only viable mode of getting to many jobs for Melburnians. Even then, though, extreme gridlock in suburbs like the Osborne's means driving to work is often not an option. And Australians are, the book shows, spending 20 per cent longer commuting than they did a decade ago - and the proportion of people spending more than 10 hours a week in transit increased by about half. That leaves public transport and, as the Grattan Institute study shows, it is the inner suburbs that are doing well while in the outer areas, just getting to a job within an hour on a bus or a tram is often not an option.

Poor access to jobs makes the job of juggling work and home so hard that many – usually women – give up work completely. The research shows that more than half the growth in jobs in Australia's biggest cities is happening less than 10 kilometres from city centres. New homes, though, are not being built quickly enough in these areas, meaning more than 50 per cent of people are moving to suburbs over 20 kilometres from the CBD. The report shows that the divide between inner and outer suburbs is also financial: the average full-time job 20 kilometres or more from the centre of Australia's five big cities pays $56,000 a year.

At the same time, the average job within 10 kilometres of city centres pays $77,000 a year. The Grattan Institute's Paul Donegan, a co-author of City Limits, said Australia's economy meant businesses were placing an increasing premium on locating in the CBDs of Melbourne and Sydney in particular. "They want to be able to recruit from the greatest pool of possible employees because skills and knowledge are increasingly important in how our economy works," he said. The housing market was not adapting to the increased focus of jobs in the CBD, he said. "In Melbourne, there are substantial amounts of CBD apartments and substantial amounts of fringe housing being built – they work for lots of people so that's good," he said.

But many wanted to buy a smaller, affordable townhouse or terrace in the inner and middle suburbs where a family could be raised – and these sorts of homes simply weren't being built, other than for the wealthy. "The city is not offering the opportunity to make those choices," Mr Donegan said. "As a result, people are increasingly only able to buy or rent far from the city centre, far from where jobs are being created." City Limits also reveals that: * Melbourne residents in suburbs more than 20 kilometres from the CBD have fewer than three jobs nearby for every 10 residents, while those close to the city centre have access to nine jobs for every 10 residents. * People are spending 20 per cent longer commuting than they did a decade ago.

The book finds that, to tackle the problem, less convoluted planning and zoning rules are required, as are higher standards for developments, so residents can live in better quality homes closer to city centres. It also recommends reducing on-street parking on congested main roads in order to dramatically speed up public transport. And the research also urges governments to increase tolling on private motorways at peak times and cut them off-peak, while simultaneously boosting access to public transport in outer suburbs. Point Cook's Alice Osborne, whose family appears as a case study in City Limits, is a perfect example of the pressure those trying to commute from the outer suburbs to central Melbourne are under. Ms Osborne and husband Jason moved from Kensington to Point Cook to find an affordable family home.

Ms Osborne worked part-time as an officer at the Department of Health in Lonsdale Street. But the pressure of juggling commuting with caring for her two children William and Lucy with husband Jason proved too much. As Ms Osborne's work paid less than her husband's, who works in IT for a major bank, she quit her job and took up part-time employment at a local Point Cook primary school, in a non-related area. Ms Osborne said she loves her suburb, but would ideally have stayed at work in health, a field she loved and had expertise in. The poor roads and public transport system in her area meant getting to and from work became too hard to manage indefinitely. "It became clear," she said, "that when we were both trying to commute back and forth into the city, it was just going to take a huge stressful toll on our family life."

She also said the $200-a-day cost of childcare had made it not worth her travelling to the city to work.