Desire paths are just the best human invention because cities will spend millions on sidewalks and yet. Our little foraging brains will think ‘too far cut thru grass for food’ and others will be like ‘other human have good idea. I follow’ until there’s a beaten path when there’s perfectly acceptable sidewalks to either side
For example
these are called “olifantenpaadjes” in dutch (little elephant paths) (remember this for later it’s important) and there’s a whole facebook page dedicated to it, where people can send in pictures of these “elephant paths” all across the country and they get rated with stars.
apparently, a city renovated its park, and ended up putting a tree branch over a beloved path:
of course, this meant the path had become unusable, which is an utter tragedy, so an anonymous citizen did the rational thing and got up in the middle of the night, went to the park, and cut the branch in half using a chainsaw.
so like.. this citizen should probably get arrested for destruction of public property right??? nah. the city just thought it was funny and even made a joke about it when the renovated park got-re opened. the only thing to come out of it was this photo, posted by a local news site:
and that’s the story of how dutch people really, really, really love their little elephant paths.
