I created a desire path by biking to school every day in high school. After I left a sidewalk popped up covering it inch for inch. Mission accomplished
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 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
Makes heaps of sense, when you can. Still need something for people in wheelchairs and stuff early on though.
I've often thought painting lines across paths and then observing the paint wear off could tell you a lot about which paths could be removed, or where corners could be rounded off better.
Fences don't always work, I saw one go up and soon had a hole in it. Turns out deer are pretty persistent and willing to break them. Paths are not just used by people.
That's why there are all those "keep off the grass" signs. If people just walked all over the grass willy-nilly we'd soon be knee deep in benches and bins, and nobody wants that.
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.
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.
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.
The desire path curved towards the road crossing, they paved a straight path pointing away from the crossing, new curved desire path formed by people crossing the road
Apart from the path that is added, the shadow on the trashcan gets darker and wider, the bushes are more "noisy" and the parts that were already drawn in panel 1 have shifted down by halve a pixel.
This gives me huge canvas vibes because that was happening a lot there. Haha (It was called canvas, right? The event where you place a pixel every so often.)
Image where the bush fence appears, there should be a faint path near the road, those who don't want to hop over/wreck the bush but it should be gone once the path through the bush is open.