Public Trails Legal access to wild places, computed from official records

About

What this is, and what it will not do

Public Trails computes whether the public may lawfully reach a wild place, using only records that governments publish: cadastral parcels and their tenure, protected-area estate, road reserves, watercourses, published tracks and the statutes that govern them.

On-ground signage and temporary closures override this page. Always.

Every claim carries a grade

  • A Gazetted / register — The fact is itself a statutory record.
  • B Official spatial record — Read from a maintained government layer.
  • C Statutory inference — Law applied to B-grade records; not ground-truthed.
  • D Community record — Community sources; labelled, never blended into A–C.

Grades never improve by being combined. A chain of facts is published at the grade of its weakest link, which is why a single statutory inference holds an entire route at grade C.

Four verdicts, two of which publish nothing

  1. 1 · Formal track A managed track on public estate, end to end. Walk it.
  2. 2 · Public estate, no track Lawful to be there; unmanaged terrain and route caveats below. This page is here.
  3. 3 · Unconfirmed No lawful chain could be established from the public record. No route published.
  4. 4 · No lawful route Enclosed by land the public has no right to cross. No route published.

Tiers 3 and 4 are results, not failures. They are published as their own pages with the reason stated, and they carry no legs, no distances and no line on a map.

Limits worth stating plainly

This is a tenure verdict, not a safety rating

Lawful is not safe. Cliffs, flash flooding, cold water and unmanaged terrain do not appear in a land record, and nothing on this site should be read as an assessment of them.

Records go stale

Every page is built from dated snapshots, and every page prints those dates in its footer. A closure declared after the snapshot is invisible here — which is why on-ground signage overrides this site without exception.

Community data is quarantined

OpenStreetMap contributions may populate one thing only: a community name, at grade D, labelled as such. They never enter a tenure decision, a route, or the map tiles.

Some records are restricted for good reason

Aboriginal cultural heritage site locations are restricted by law to protect the sites. This project holds registered party boundaries only and will never republish site locations, in any form, at any zoom.

What this page will never do

  • No user pins

    Every fact here traces to a government layer or a statute and carries a grade, A to C. Community names are quarantined at grade D and labelled as such. Nothing on this page was dropped on a map by a stranger.

  • No invented lawfulness

    Where tenure cannot be confirmed from the public record, the page says so instead of endorsing the route or quietly hiding it. Where no lawful corridor exists at all, none is published — the refusal is the answer.

  • No safety pretence

    A tier is a tenure verdict, not a difficulty or safety rating. Unmanaged terrain, cliffs and flash flooding are not in the cadastre. The engine reads land records, not the weather.