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?
Why would we let some arsehole planner dictate how we move in our spaces?
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”?
People weren’t supposed to create that shortcut in the first place, thus disrespecting the park.
weren’t supposed to
As if walking on grass in an emtpy park is comparable to driving a red light on a busy street.
Green spaces: Just for viewing.
What kind of dystopian hellscape do you want the world to be, exactly?
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.
This has to be a joke right? Are you actually mad about desire paths?
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.
Desire lines.
An early documented example is Broadway in New York City, which follows the Wecquaesgeek trail which predates American colonization.
Nice
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…
“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.
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.
https://youtu.be/VoAfb3f04mo Where there’s a whip, there’s a way.
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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.
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.
Gradient descent - human version
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).
Proof mankind in it’s natural state is truly irredeemable
It’s kinda beautiful. Like an artwork perfectly depicting human nature.
Nah, I like it. It clearly shows the intent of movement of people and it basically minimises trail around time.
Human nature to fuck nice shit up. This is why I don’t cater.
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.
I like how upset people are in the comments. Even has random ass comments about capitalism. This is great lol
Meme successful.
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
If you’re happy with the status quo, you never left reddit.
I hope it’s a temporary thing, but these temporary things tend to last and multiply
The problem is a lack of “Beware of Grass Ticks” signs.
Beware of ticks, land mines, and bear traps.
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…
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
