Gradient descent - human version
This comment section is surprisingly spicy
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.
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.
It’s kinda beautiful. Like an artwork perfectly depicting human nature.
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).
“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.
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.
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.
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.
Meme successful.
My brain is so Death Stranding-coded right now that I tried to give the path a bunch of likes.
Speaking of which, I think it’s about time I clock-in 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.
seems to me its the entire motivation. but whether the shortcuts have impact on the grass is in tension with 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.
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.
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
Today, I’m astonished to learn about the existence of anti-desire path people based on the comments here
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 wanted to say that surely nobody is complaining about desire paths and then I scrolled just a little bit… yikes!
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.
Sometimes it is just carelessness of the people. Being blind to your felliw peoples 's needs. Dropping trash where they stand. Refusing to walk two more steps on the pathway and kill the grass instead.
In this case the requirements analysis of the parks and recreations dept was just bad and they are the asshole.
The parks department tried to work against what people wanted by blocking the path people wanted to use.
