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.
Why is it human nature to not follow directions and pay attention better?
People have a reason to walk direct paths. People have no reason to walk obtuse, winding paths. What is gained from “following directions”?
ok sheeple
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.
I wanted to say that surely nobody is complaining about desire paths and then I scrolled just a little bit… yikes!
Today, I’m astonished to learn about the existence of anti-desire path people based on the comments here
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.
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
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
For me, it was heavy on the “you can’t please everyone” aspect. You try and try, first at enforcing the solution you thought was best, but people have their own problems and their own agenda. Then you try to accommodate that. But you’ll find that there’s always someone whom you can’t please.
That was my personal take-away.
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.
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
Proof mankind in it’s natural state is truly irredeemable
Nah, I like it. It clearly shows the intent of movement of people and it basically minimises trail around time.
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 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.
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.
Human nature, not just nature.
I was finally happy…too happy…
Desire lines.
I like how upset people are in the comments. Even has random ass comments about capitalism. This is great lol
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.
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.
“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.
deleted by creator
https://youtu.be/VoAfb3f04mo Where there’s a whip, there’s a way.
Not at forst, but when that hedge is step-overable I would
I’m 50 and in great shape. I’m squeezing between fences and leaping small barricades on my walk to get bananas at grocery. Walk life is so different than eating-while-sitting-and-driving-but-still-somehow-sweating life of cars.
This comment section is surprisingly spicy
The problem is a lack of “Beware of Grass Ticks” signs.
Beware of ticks, land mines, and bear traps.
Gradient descent - human version
It’s just a few extra steps, you lazy fuckers!
It’s poor urban design. Put paths where people want to go
The whole point of the post is that it doesn’t matter where they put the path, people will decide it’s not “where they would have put it” and make their oun path.
“Get off my lawn!”
/s, but I’m getting there…
Human nature to fuck nice shit up. This is why I don’t cater.
