I live in Lara. It is a genuine township now — thousands of households, its own schools, sporting clubs, shops and a railway station on the main Melbourne line. What it does not have is a safe, continuous way to travel south toward Corio and central Geelong on foot or by bike.
You can drive it in fifteen minutes. You cannot sensibly ride it, and you certainly would not let a twelve-year-old try.
01 / The problem, plainlyWhat "no route" actually means.
There are footpaths within Lara. There are good local links in parts of the township. There is a bus, and now a seven-day service connecting the station to Avalon Airport and the employment precinct.
What there isn't is a continuous protected corridor — the kind that runs the whole way, separated from high-speed traffic, lit, sealed and signed, so that a reasonably confident person of any age can use it without making a risk calculation at every intersection.
Figure 01 · The three tests
A route only counts if it passes all three.
Continuous
No gaps. A route that is excellent for four kilometres and then dumps you onto a road shoulder has failed, because the whole journey is only as safe as its worst hundred metres.
Protected
Separated from high-speed traffic, with safe crossings where it must interact with roads. A painted line beside 80km/h traffic is not protection.
Usable by anyone
The test I keep coming back to: would you let a competent twelve-year-old ride it alone? If not, it isn't a community route — it's a route for confident adults.
A path network is only as good as its weakest link. Fifteen kilometres of beautiful sealed trail counts for very little if you have to cross an arterial road with no signals to reach it.— David Greenwood OAM
02 / What it costs usFour real consequences.
Figure 02 · The cost of the gap
Who this actually affects, and how.
| Who | What the gap costs them |
|---|---|
| Young people | Part-time work, training and social life all become dependent on a parent driving. A teenager who could ride to a job in Corio in half an hour instead cannot get there at all. |
| Workers at Avalon and the precinct | Entry-level jobs fifteen minutes away by car are effectively car-only jobs. That excludes exactly the people who most need a first job — and undercuts the "local benefit" argument for the precinct. |
| Older residents | When driving stops, independence stops with it. A safe route to the station and to local services is the difference between staying in the community and leaving it. |
| Every household running two cars | Poor active transport quietly makes a second car compulsory. That is a substantial annual household cost imposed by an infrastructure gap. |
This is why I argue active transport is transport infrastructure, not recreation. Every one of these is an access-to-work, access-to-services problem.
03 / Why it hasn't happenedThree honest reasons.
Geography. The distance between Lara and the northern suburbs is genuinely open country in places, crossed by major road and rail infrastructure. It is a harder engineering problem than adding a path within a suburb.
Split responsibility. A corridor like this touches council roads, state roads, rail land and in places private property. Projects with four owners move at the speed of the slowest one, and nobody's core budget quite covers it.
It's nobody's crisis. This is the real reason. A missing path doesn't generate an incident report. It generates absence — trips that never happen, jobs never applied for, teenagers driven everywhere. Absence doesn't appear in any dataset, so it never becomes urgent.
How it gets treated
A nice-to-have recreational upgrade, competing with roads and drains for capital funding.
What it actually is
The access infrastructure that determines who in this ward can reach work, training and services without a car.
04 / How you'd actually do itIncrementally, and starting now.
The reason I think this is winnable rather than aspirational is that it does not have to be built as one project. A corridor can be assembled in segments, each useful on its own day one.
Figure 03 · A staged approach
Five steps, cheapest and most useful first.
Stages one and two are council's own responsibility and comparatively inexpensive. They are also the two that deliver most of the benefit, which is why I'd start there rather than waiting for a complete corridor to be funded.
05 / What I'd ask forThree specific things.
One. Adopt and publish a designated Lara active transport corridor, so it exists as policy and can be required of adjacent development.
Two. Fund the township-to-station and township-to-precinct links as discrete projects in the capital program, not as line items dependent on an unfunded grand plan.
Three. Count the demand and publish it. Survey residents on the trips they would make if the route existed. Evidence of suppressed demand is exactly what turns an advocacy letter into a fundable case — and it's the thing we currently don't have.
Two things I'd genuinely like from you. First: if there's a specific crossing or gap on your route that feels unsafe, tell me exactly where. Second: tell me the trip you would make if a safe route existed — to work, to the station, to training. Suppressed demand is invisible until someone writes it down. Email david@centrestage.org.au with "Lara route" in the subject.