‘Desire Paths’: 75 Times City Planners Couldn’t Anticipate People’s Needs (New Pics)

Desire paths are also known as desire lines, and they form when humans or animals take the most efficient route to get where they need to go. It is completely natural to want to have time and energy when you move.

The existence of desire paths is a fabulous opportunity for city planners and architects to look at how human movement naturally flows versus where they expect pedestrian traffic to go and what paths they should pave.

Aesthetics are absolutely important, and living in beautiful (not just functional and minimalist) surroundings can empower and energize you, yes. But, as an architect or planner, you also have to look at how pedestrians naturally move and adapt to the reality of the situation.

If, instead, you simply go through with your original designs, without caring for the people who live in the city you’re designing, you are making the entire system more inefficient and unfriendly than it needs to be.

Generally, it takes as few as 15 walks through an unpaved bit of ground to start wearing a visible trail. Then, people’s routes get guided down the new route much quicker because it is now visible. You intuitively want to follow it… and so you do. The desire path becomes even more visible, attracting even more pedestrians. The loop continues. And eventually, the trail becomes established.

Surprisingly, recent research suggests that when people are walking about, they naturally tend to turn to the left and walk in an anticlockwise direction.

“If you simply ask someone to start walking, whether they are wandering around a museum, a supermarket, or even an empty room, it is surprisingly likely that they will drift counterclockwise,” Dr Iñaki Echeverría-Huarte, at the University of Navarra in Spain, explains.

“Each of us carries a small personal bias to turn slightly to one side, and when many people share a space, those tiny biases add up into a net counterclockwise rotation.”

“None of us is perfectly symmetrical, and the way each person’s brain gathers sensory information and coordinates it with the muscles seems to tip them gently to one side. I should be honest, though. “We have tested several ideas and the bias stubbornly keeps showing up, so the exact mechanism is still an open question,” Dr Echeverría-Huarte said.

During an earlier interview with the friendly moderator team running the r/DesirePath online community, Bored Panda learned all about the group’s history and the phenomenon surrounding natural foot traffic.

“Once people know they [desire paths] have a name, they start seeing them all over the place. It’s a ‘once you see, you can’t unsee’ scenario,” one moderator explained to us.

“If you haven’t noticed a desire path before, look for worn-down grass made by people who step off the sidewalk and decide to take the shortcut instead. They’re not the designated, paved paths. They’re paths that are trod on the grass in between,” the mod told the Bored Panda team earlier.

The r/DesirePath moderator said that, in Dutch, some people call desire paths ‘elephant paths,’ though they’re not quite sure how common the phrase is. “I think the translation is Olifantenpaadje. Someone on the subreddit said they’re called Trampelpfad in German,” they said.

“When I originally joined the subreddit, it was about 3,000 subscribers deep. I’d seen someone mention it in a comment section, likely on a post of a desire path on /r/pics or a mention in r/AskReddit of these paths being paved following natural foot traffic on a college campus,” the mod told Bored Panda earlier.

“A user named SecularScience created the subreddit after someone posted a picture of a desire path on another subreddit, probably r/pics, and a commenter noted that they have a name! It [the online community] emerged out of curiosity,” the mod shared.

They added that the community continues to expand through word of mouth. “When someone unknowingly posts a picture of a desire path, people tag the subreddit and the community grows.”

Currently, the r/DesirePath community gets 34k weekly visitors. The online group has been around since 2013, and it will celebrate its 13th birthday later this year, in September.

According to the moderators, anyone posting photos in the group should focus only on the paths that pedestrians prefer, not the ones that humans create. What’s more, this particular online community mainly focuses on human paths, not ones made by motor vehicles or captive animals. Other animal paths might be fine, but it is up to the discretion of the mods and the community.

We can’t wait to hear what you have to say, Pandas.

What are the closest desire paths to your home, school, or work? How often do you take desire paths during your daily commute? If you were a city planner or architect, how would you improve your local area to be more people-friendly?

Share your thoughts (and photos if you have any!) in the comments at the very bottom of this list.