Melburnians shouldn’t be forced to live on the outer fringes of the city and be ‘beholden’ to their cars, a new report says.

The report by the Australian Council of Learned Academies outlines the shortcomings and haphazard planning of Australia’s major cities.

With predictions Melbourne could be home to up to 8 million people, ACOLA general manager Jacques de Vos Malan said it was inevitable the population would continue to grow.

‘We imagine it is going to be considerably bigger in terms of people,’ he said.

‘I think that’s a fact we probably have to accept.’

But pushing people further out to Melbourne’s outer fringes was problematic, and a lacking public transport infrastructure made some in outlying suburbs ‘beholden’ to their cars.

‘The trick is to try and plan for it, rather than allowing the haphazard growth and spread that you were describing,’ he told Tom Elliott on 3AW Drive.

He said those forced to take their cars to work would be badly implicated if the costs of motoring continued to rise.

LISTEN: ACOLA general manager Jacques de Vos Malan on 3AW Drive