Yet despite having the kind of high-quality public transport that makes leaving the car at home a viable option for many residents, Northcote's gentrified streets are among the most car-clogged in Melbourne. Traffic in High Street, Northcote. Credit:Craig Abraham A congestion map produced as part of The Age's liveability index (shown below) puts Northcote in the middle of a cluster of northern suburbs that all suffer some of the city's slowest-moving traffic. From Alphington to Ascot Vale east-west, and from Carlton to Coburg south-north, Melbourne's north is an angry shade of red, or at least a peevish orange, on the map despite the availability of good alternatives to the car.

So what's creating all the congestion? Transport expert John Stanley, from the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, said it was no surprise cars wereeating Melbourne, even where public transport was plentiful. Melbourne's mostly radial transport network was geared towards journeys in and out of the city, and so failed to serve the mobility needs of the increasing number of people in the suburbs who were travelling in all different directions, he said. Professor Stanley said this was especially true of the middle suburbs, which was a good argument for Labor's aggressive target of removing 50 level crossings in eight years. "The middle suburbs are as much about moving around as moving radially, and moving around is really hard in peak times in particular because of the level crossing problem," he said.

Buses could also do a lot more heavy lifting if they were more frequent and direct, he argued. Elsewhere, the map reveals congestion exists in a series of disjointed clumps; bad in the foothills of the Dandenongs in suburbs such as Mulgrave, Scoresby, Hallam and Wantirna; relatively light in the affluent east and around the bay; bad again in the north-west around Melbourne Airport. Produced by town planners Tract, the congestion index is a difficult jigsaw puzzle for urban planners to solve. The rankings are based on the Victorian Integrated Transport Model – the same data the state government bureaucracy uses in its transport planning – which measures traffic flow and capacity on Victoria's main roads and highways throughout the day (not just in the peak). Smaller, council-owned roads are not included in the model. Tract town planner Anthony Corbett cautioned that the map should not be interpreted as a sign that red-coloured suburbs have terrible congestion while greener postcodes are a driver's dream.

It was probably true that "congestion is everywhere", he said, and with each suburb ranked and put into one of six groups according to how much strain its roads were under, the difference between worst and best was relatively minor. "So this isn't saying that Blackburn isn't congested. It's just saying relative to Tullamarine, it isn't as congested," Mr Corbett said. Some suburbs on the suburban fringe scored badly because they had a rudimentary road network that easily jammed up, not because there was a huge amount of traffic there, he said. These included Warrandyte and Tecoma in the outer east and Skye and Carrum Downs in the south.