The building where my office is is on a small hill off toward one edge of campus, and to get to the Campus Center, you used to be able to go out the main door, and go either left down a gently curving path to the other academic buildings, or right, where the sidewalk runs along the top of a slightly steep bank over to a driveway that then runs down to the loading dock at the Campus Center. Most people would choose the left-hand path, and most of those who took the right-hand path would cut down the bank rather than walk all the way out to the driveway.
I say "used to" because there's a new building going into the space where the left-hand path used to be, so that area is all fenced off and dug up now. In order to re-route the utility services, they also had to dig up the sidewalk for the right-hand path, and pretty much the whole bank on that side. Which they have carefully rebuilt to be exactly the way it was before the construction. Only now there are at least twice as many people taking that path, and cutting down the bank rather than following the sidewalk all the way out. There's already a well-trodden path through the new grass that they planted, and as soon as the students get back next week, there will be a trench down the hill in that spot.
This happens at every college and university campus, as far as I can tell. The people who design the campus carefully lay out intricate patterns of sidewalks that presumably look very nice from the air, but have no clear relationship to the paths people actually follow when they walk from one building to another. As a result, every summer the grounds crew spends an inordinate amount of time restoring the paths that are worn in the lawns by students cutting directly across the grass rather than following the odd indirect paths required to stay on the sidewalk.
I really don't understand this. I particularly don't understand why they don't fix this when they have the opportunity. I can understand that it might be difficult to predict where people will choose to walk before you build the buildings, but once you know what the actual traffic pattern is, why not adjust the paved paths when you have the chance? The effort they spent on seeding and mulching the bank next to the science building would've been better spent putting in steps, or at least a paved path down the route that people will actually walk. Instead, we have patchy grass that will be a muddy trench three weeks from now.
It's not even like this is purely local stupidity, because every college I've been at has the same problem. They'll have a lovely quad laid out with sidewalks all around the outside, and a dirt path worn through the middle of the lawn by students and faculty taking a more direct route. It makes no sense.
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i've heard rumors that MIT once just seeded an entire area with grass, waited a year, and paved over the paths that had formed. that made so much sense to me when i heard it that i can't understand why that isn't the default method everywhere, college campuses or city parks.
maybe it's some instinctive desire to "get it finished"; to put an end to the landscaping and call it done. but that, of course, ignores the fact that all landscaping will require ongoing maintenance anyway, so it's still silly.
(there are out-of-the-way spots in my town where parking lots and back alleys connect only through well-worn informal foot and bike paths, usually crossing lawns and curbs. i notice these because i bike and walk a lot. i wish the city would just give in and cover those spots with paving stones already, since they're never going to go away unless traffic patterns change.)
When I was at Penn State's University Park campus, the groundskeepers had an admirable policy. They tried directing foot traffic onto the original concrete pathways by using posts with chains slung between them, but when that failed, and a footpath began forming across a lawn, they would come in on the weekend and put in a paved blacktop surface over the footpath, making it a standard width. With twenty minutes between classes, and a mile or more to cover, going the long way around anything never made any sense.
@Nomen, I'd heard that about Thomas Jefferson when he laid out UVA...
Preach it, brother! Our university is the same. It's like the campus planners seem to know where people should walk, dammit! And when they don't, out come the mulch and seed and posts and chains, and when those don't work, the lovely snow fences.
There are sidewalks on campus that are almost never used. People want to walk, where they want to walk. My sense is that there'd be a lot less concrete used in the long run, if they'd put it where the people want to walk.
I heard that when George Mason University was built, they allowed people to form their own paths through the grass, and then paved them, as in the stories above.
Neither of the universities I've attended (Xavier, Minnesota) have had this problem. Being more urban campuses, there's not as many open spaces of grass, I guess, and they've identified the common routes well enough that there aren't any well-worn paths through the grass.
You can also take Indiana's approach and have woods in the middle of the open areas, so that cutting across is not worthwhile. I also think it's very scenic.
We had the same rumor about MIT but we always heard it as applied to ourselves. It's a simple enough idea that it could have been copied from the rumor and actually applied some decades ago. I tended to believe it because our quad walkways were, at the time, very well designed.
(We've changed the campus since then in multiple ways and I don't know if the quad path still seem well-designed or not.)
My related irritation is in parking lots. Two out of the four that I frequent most often are just completely screwed up. The one at the local gym would be functional except for the irregularly placed concrete thingies that screw up the traffic flow. And then, the one at the big complex with my supermarket, coffee shop, several local restaurant, movie rental, etc is so poorly designed I think it's intentional. It's very obviously designed to "guide" traffic, but it's guiding traffic away from where they want to go and generally pissing everyone off. (I believe that large parking lot is owned in three chunks, and that the center owner actively decided to try and make it tougher to get to the fringe lots. If his idea is to drive business away and snap up the real estate for himself, it may be working.)
I don't remember where I read this; it was probably in a novel, not a factual account:
A college spent a summer putting down sidewalk on the well-worn paths that students actually used and ripping up the unused sidewalks. When school started again in the fall, returning students very carefully followed the route of the old, now-vanished sidewalks, even when it meant skirted newly-planted bushes.
The "Active Walker" model (Helbing, Keltsch, & Molnar 1997; Helbing, Schweitzer, Keltsch & Molnar 1997) has been successful at modeling such spontaneous path formation. Such path formation has also been studies using virtual environments (Goldstone & Roberts 2006; Goldstone, Jones, & Roberts 2006). Spontaneous paths formed by people connecting multiple point approach the form of a Minimal Steiner Tree which minimizes the total path area needed to connect all points.
My campus eventually paved over some of the worst of these natural paths. Though people walked through the same areas they play sports or other things, and they paved right through our frisbee field! We were forced to play in others areas that were more prominent, wore those areas down, and ruined some of the aesthetic appeal. There can many effects, good and bad, of such perturbations.
My campus eventually paved over some of the worst of these natural paths. Though people walked through the same areas they play sports or other things, and they paved right through our frisbee field! We were forced to play in others areas that were more prominent, wore those areas down, and ruined some of the aesthetic appeal. There can many effects, good and bad, of such perturbations.
There are limits, of course. I'm not suggesting that Union should pave over the path that gets worn across the rugby/frisbee field, because there's a definite reason for keeping that space open. The hill by the science building, on the other hand, doesn't get used for anything else.
To be fair, they did finally recognize the traffic pattern across the courtyard with the statue of Chester Arthur, and re-pave accordingly. It's a little ugly, the way they did it, but at least they now treat it as a normal path.
Same thing happens in the public park near my house. Most of the paths are actually pretty well laid out and used, but there's a large monument/currently non-functional drinking fountain that for some reason is about 6 feet from the nearest path. (Or possibly vice versa.) So OF COURSE the grass around it is all trodden down and nasty-looking. I mean, what do they expect?
The "lay concrete over natural paths" thing does happen pretty regularly. The clearest case I know of is at a campus with very high bike ridership... which is a bit different I suppose.