94 “Desire Paths” That Show Human Stubbornness In The Nicest Way Possible (New Pics)

No matter how neatly the sidewalk is paved by a bus stop or how lush the grass looks in a park, it rarely stops people from carving out their own desire paths anyway. And once you spot one right in front of you, chances are you’ll take it too, instead of sticking to the route someone else planned. In fact, it apparently takes as few as fifteen trips across an unpaved stretch for a desire path to start forming, and after that, it’s basically a done deal.

We’ve probably been doing this for ages, but the term is often traced to French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who wrote about “lignes de désir” in his 1958 book The Poetics of Space, according to The Guardian.

Nature author Robert Macfarlane has also written about what these informal shortcuts reveal about us. In his 2012 book The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, Macfarlane calls them “elective easements” and says: “Paths are human; they are traces of our relationships.”

Depending on who you ask, they also go by “desire lines,” especially in transportation and planning circles. And they’ve picked up plenty of nicknames, too, like “cow paths,” “social trails,” and even “elephant trails,” per The New Yorker. The names may differ, but the message stays the same: “This is where we actually go.”

At their simplest, desire paths are trails worn into the ground by repeated footsteps, usually because they offer a faster way through. You’ll spot them cutting across grass in parks, slicing corners on campuses, or appearing next to sidewalks where the official route takes one extra turn too many. At their most interesting, though, they raise a bigger question about our habits and why we keep making them wherever we go.

Some researchers see desire paths as a sign that pedestrians can’t or won’t follow the routes laid out for them. One academic journal even says they “record collective disobedience.” Others interpret them in a simpler way: less as rebellion and more as practicality, since they usually mark the quickest or most convenient way to reach a destination.

That, in turn, can point to flaws in a city’s design, meaning walkways weren’t built where they needed to be, and desire paths end up revealing the mismatch. That’s why many places pay attention to where people naturally walk, then adjust their layouts later. Kurt Kohlstedt notes this in a piece for 99% Invisible.

In Finland, for example, he writes that city officials document where people walk in parks after the first snowfall of the year, then use that data in their trail planning. Similarly, a number of educational institutions, including Virginia Tech and the University of California, Berkeley, have reportedly waited to see which routes students, faculty, and staff take regularly before deciding where to pave additional pathways across campus. Pretty cool, right?

At the same time, desire paths aren’t always harmless. In nature areas, repeated off-trail travel can create visible tracks, damage vegetation, and encourage even more people to follow the same line.

Leave No Trace guidance specifically recommends spreading out when traveling off-trail so you don’t create a brand-new route that others will copy, and the U.S. National Park Service also emphasizes dispersing use in pristine areas to prevent new trails from forming.

So while desire paths can be funny and even wholesome in cities, in fragile landscapes the kindest choice is often to resist the shortcut for once.