Gradient descent - human version
this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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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
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.
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).
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!
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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.
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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.
This comment section is surprisingly spicy
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
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
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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.
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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.
The problem is a lack of "Beware of Grass Ticks" signs.
Beware of ticks, land mines, and bear traps.
"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 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.
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.
Where there is a will, there's a way. I've seen a desire path form through 3m (10ft) tall pine bush on a steep hillside lmao
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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.
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Desire lines.
An early documented example is Broadway in New York City, which follows the Wecquaesgeek trail which predates American colonization.
Nice
You say this is human nature, but I see this comments section filled with good little doggies that follow master's rules.
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