Comic Strips

Ah the ol' desire path strikes again!

I've heard a story about a college campus that didn't install any paths, waited for natural dirt paths to form in the grass, then installed paths there. Neat idea.

In my junior high days (mid 80s) My friends and I found a machete in one of their dad’s stuff. We spent a weekend bushwhacking paths around some city-owned but undeveloped land near a lake. We ended up wearing them down pretty good into bike paths with some jumps and cool whoops. A few years later, the city turned it into a park and paved our paths.

I have a hobby of doing the opposite: making undesirepaths.

During large snowfalls, I often need to bring out the shovel and make a path, both from my house and in front of it towards the main road. I like to add turns and bends, just enough to confuse and lightly annoy, but not enough for people to consider stepping into deep snow or making their own path.

I like how the path curves behind the bench after the bench goes up like people are choosing not to walk in front of people sitting on the bench.

A full bench!? I miss benches that made sense instead of the hostile architecture ones popping up.

I heard Finnish municipalities do studies when it's newly snowed to check where the desired footpath goes by looking at tracks in the snow. It avoids that issue in the image

University of Maryland did this with their walkways for a while. They let the kids beat down paths for the year to make the sidewalks.

https://xkcd.com/85/

not the content we deserve, but the content we desire

Local discounter had something like this, they just installed a hedge AND a fence. Really disenchanting. Not going there anymore.

Well I moved. But they cheated.

My takeaway from this is that I can spawn park benches and greenery by walking on the grass.

All I see here is people tricking the government into putting in a nice little micropark.

These are called desire paths.

We were looking after someones dog for a week and we have a big yard for our dogs. This dog and one of ours got on so well they would chase each around the yard for hours, so much that after a week there was a desire path race track formed with noticeable banks around the corners and everything.

Least resistance or classic human defiance?

There's been locations in the past where the decision was made to initially just build the minimum paths for handicap access and etc and then wait for the desire paths to form to decide where to put the rest of them. Great idea really. The apartment complex started plowing the one that goes from my building to the gas station.

Apparently when they were building the death star, they couldn't figure out where to put the vents, so they just turned off the gravity and threw a bunch of womp rats in the center and built out pipes along the vectors of where they died.

That hedge could actually be a gods windbreak behind the bench

The last path doesn't match the prior paths.

social trails

This is great!

For the life of me, I can't figure out what changes between panel 10 and 11.

I especially like when people do this in the snow and make big holes that I can easily step into