This comment section is surprisingly spicy
I think it was a US uni campus, that redid the lawn and didn’t put down any walking paths and waited for the desire paths to form and then paved those
I was coming here to say that! It’s possibly apocryphal, but the way I heard it was that the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign did this when they did their main quad (I still remember them telling me this when I got a tour before applying there 30 years ago). And they didn’t just look for where the plants were dead, but they also looked for broadleaf weeds, which sustain trampling better than grasses (it’s a land grant university in the midwest. Of course there’s an agriculture angle).
I love how the third and second to last panel are the same, as if nature paused briefly before it decided to open another path.
Had to double check when I read this. Zoomed in super close, and the second to last panel actually has a veeery faint outline of a new path
Human nature, not just nature.
“desire paths” well and good, but who (above the age of 15) is jumping a hedge to save 3 second walk time? Must be next to a school.
I’m more concerned about the city planner who was so strongly against the idea that the path should be coming right out of that crosswalk. That’s just insulting, like they WANT everyone to waste just 3 more seconds.
I like how upset people are in the comments. Even has random ass comments about capitalism. This is great lol
Isn’t that normal on lemmy? It’s also fully expected to see some comments about Israel under every post no matter how unrelated it is. People made fun of political obsession on reddit, but to me lemmy has always felt much worse in this regard
Meme successful.
The problem is a lack of “Beware of Grass Ticks” signs.
Beware of ticks, land mines, and bear traps.
It’s just a few extra steps, you lazy fuckers!
It’s poor urban design. Put paths where people want to go
To everybody acting like the desire path is the problem:
- If the problem for you is that it’s ‘bad’ or ‘illegal’, grow a spine so that when you need to break the law, for something that matters, you can do it with dry pants.
- If the design doesn’t take into account how people will interact with it, it’s bad and lazy. Only time it would be acceptable to ‘force’ a way to interact with something is when there are safety concerns, and there are none here.
- You are traped in a cage of your own making, break free or perish like the dog you are.
Today, I’m astonished to learn about the existence of anti-desire path people based on the comments here
I wanted to say that surely nobody is complaining about desire paths and then I scrolled just a little bit… yikes!
Not that I have a particular problem with desire paths, but what’s shown in the comic here is an example of how the design changed to take into account how people are interacting with it, and yet it didn’t work out.
right, it was changed specifically to deny the most popular use. so thats why it doesnt work.
The only time where the design actually changed, the designer made the point of moving the path away from whhere the desire path was pointing.
That comic captures it so incredibly well. It’s almost perfect.
It didn’t work out because the design didn’t change, it was reinforced. Each attempt failed because there was no actual effort to understand why it’s not working. Like wraping a leaky rusted pipe in ducktape.
Um. You did notice panel 10 - 12, right?
Yes? The new path is there because it’s still shorter, people don’t walk in straight lines and sharp angles. That design is still lazy and not thought out
I mean what is a “thought out” path, besides just saying fuck it and paving whole plot. I mean maybe a funnel or something, but again kind of seems likely that we’d wind up with more desire paths forming just differently, maybe people coming from different starting points etc…
Yeah, that person you replied to missed the point entirely, and all the people who up-voted them.
Oh. What is the point then? /gen
Seriously. The rabidly boot licking deference obedience and weird conflation if the constructed with the natural/universal is like the worst thing we get from the mostly-christian (anti)intellectual tradition.
These people are not fit to be adults in a built environment. Their states if mind should not be allowed in a world with such feats of artifice as concrete and movable type.
Ok being real dude, I don’t think this behavior is a product of “mostly-christian (anti)intellectual tradition,” it’s just the type of people who never grew out of the color-in-the-lines and follow-your-line-buddy stuff from grade school. I don’t think there’s any spectacular political statement to be made here.
I’ll accept that the corellation is higher up the cognitive chain than that. You may be correct. There’s still a political statement here, but that one may have been off the mark.
My brain is so Death Stranding-coded right now that I tried to give the path a bunch of likes 👍👍👍
I wonder if the experience of ‘shortcut’ is part of the motivation, so that as soon as you’ve established a path, what constitutes ‘shortcut’ also changes. I’d be interested to know if curved paths were more desire path-resistant, because they appeal to an intuition about adjusting (and therefore optimizing) course.
seems to me its the entire motivation. but whether the shortcuts have impact on the grass depends on how popular they are. people shortcut randomly all the time but it only makes a desire path when a large number of them go the same way regularly
Note that my (implied) emphasis is on experience. If the experience is what is important, convenience isn’t actually what creates desire paths. Instead it’s the experience of making a personal choice to increase efficiency, of joining a club of renegades who brave the path less traveled, etc… So maybe allowing for that experience in the managed environment is another way of limiting desire paths.
yes that makes sense. i think the degree of desire for that experience is always there, but the more rigid the built environment is, the more frustrated that desire becomes.
You say this is human nature, but I see this comments section filled with good little doggies that follow master’s rules.
Yet desire paths will always happen regardless.
In the comic, the desire path happened because they wouldn’t just connect to the crosswalk. Even in the end, the constructed path connects to the sidewalk slightly to the side instead of going straight to the crosswalk.
Desire paths happen because of poor, antihuman design choices.
But why is it human nature to put a bench right where people are walking. It’s like people in charge get off on creating obstacles for the common man just to feel powerful.
Over time, it will destroy large parts of the park.
A field of monoculture grass is already destroyed.
Ackchyually, grass is almost always a mixture of different species (ryegrass, fescue and bluegrass) and therefore not a monoculture.
A lawn has its uses in parks, for example to have a Picknick. If you trow in some clover, daisies and ribwort, don’t spray and patches are left to grow to provide shelter it’s not that bad for biodiversity, depending on the climate of course.
Yeah, there’s grass and then there’s grass. Sure. I got no beef with a field of mixed grass that’s left to grow, especially if there’s mixed native wildflowers etc.
It’s the fields of monoculture non-native grass that the Suburban White Dude[tm] wants to obsessively cultivate and that seems to be the goal of parks departments everywhere that’s the problem.
My partner ranted to me the other day that she couldn’t get a 10m^2 area from a local municipal parks department recently for a Miyawaki forest plot. No reasons, just “no.” Very frustrating group of fuckin’ boomers.
Shots fired.
The park that people are supposed to walk through?
Well, don’t design park the brain-dead way and try to actually think about visitors and their needs. As in make a straight route to a damn crosswalk instead of making it an obstacle course.
What? No! You should be happy to even get any green to begin with.
- Capitalism
People weren’t supposed to create that shortcut in the first place, thus disrespecting the park.
Green spaces: Just for viewing.
What kind of dystopian hellscape do you want the world to be, exactly?
weren’t supposed to
As if walking on grass in an emtpy park is comparable to driving a red light on a busy street.
This has to be a joke right? Are you actually mad about desire paths?
The park design should have accounted for the crosswalk on the top intersection from the get go or, alternatively, once the people made their desire for a path there obvious. The park isn’t some sentient thing with its own opinion, it got made by people with 2 main functions: enhancing the environment and serving as a foot path. It is obviously failing at the second until the designers finally relented and put a proper path down to the crosswalk.
Note: you will always get people not using the path but when it’s enough people to form a permanent trail then the park design obviously did not account for a rather popular destination and should be revised.
Why is it human nature to not follow directions and pay attention better?
ok sheeple
People have a reason to walk direct paths. People have no reason to walk obtuse, winding paths. What is gained from “following directions”?
Why would we let some arsehole planner dictate how we move in our spaces?
I love how almost every comment talks as if the pedestrians were the problem, and not designers.
Just made the footpath in box 2 the actual path, and slap additional stuff anywhere not-on-top-of-where-peiople-walk.
The Internet is populated by people who think English grammar is cosmic law, so it doesn’t surprise me that they think you should bend over for dogshit urban planning.
Ironically, none of them follow the rule of shutting up if they don’t know shit about shit.
This specific case would be super predictable, notice how the desire path becomes wider at the end. Pedestrian path should always do that because that’s how people walk.
Desire lines.
An early documented example is Broadway in New York City, which follows the Wecquaesgeek trail which predates American colonization.
Nice
