IELTS Reading: True, False or Not Given?

Paths nobody planned

What the tracks worn across our lawns reveal about how people move

A  Walk across almost any city park and you will see them: narrow strips of flattened grass or bare earth where people have left the paved path to cut a corner. Landscape designers call them desire paths, and transport planners use the related term desire lines for the routes people would take if nothing stood in their way. The logic behind them is simple. An official path that sends walkers around a corner or the long way round asks them to spend extra time and effort, and many decline. Once enough people have crossed the same patch of ground, the grass begins to wear away. A visible line then tends to attract more feet, so a path can establish itself within a single season.

B  For a long time, many park managers regarded these tracks as a kind of damage. The standard responses were fences, low hedges and signs asking the public to keep off the grass. Such measures occasionally worked, but more often walkers who met a fence simply stepped around its end, and within months a fresh track would appear a few metres from the old one. Barriers also had costs of their own. They had to be built, repaired and eventually replaced, and a lawn divided by railings looked less welcoming than one that people could cross freely. In many cases, the managers ended up maintaining both the barrier and the worn track it had failed to prevent.

C  In recent decades, a growing number of designers have begun to see desire paths in a different light: as free information about how people actually move through a space. Rather than guessing where paths should go, some have proposed leaving the lawns around a new building unpaved for its first months of use and then laying hard surfaces along the routes that walkers have worn. Virginia Tech, for example, announced in 2014 that it would pave dirt tracks that students had worn across the Drillfield, a large lawn at the centre of its campus, turning an informal habit into part of the official network. Supporters argue that this approach produces paths that are used rather than ignored, and that it treats the public as participants in design instead of as a problem to be managed.

D  Desire paths can also reveal needs that official maps overlook. In a study published in 2019 in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning, the researchers Alec Foster and Joshua Newell mapped the informal footpaths of Detroit, a city where decades of population decline have left large areas of vacant land. Using aerial images and repeated surveys from the street, they recorded more than 5,000 paths with a combined length of over 150 miles. Many connected homes to schools and bus stops. Between 2010 and 2016, however, far more paths disappeared than were created, as plots were fenced, built on or left to become overgrown. The researchers argued that planners redeveloping vacant land should first study how residents already use it.

E  Outside cities, the same process looks less benign. In nature reserves and national parks, informal routes are often called social trails, and managers worry about them for good reason: every pair of feet flattens plants and compacts the soil, which makes it harder for vegetation to recover. A 2014 review that combined the results of nine controlled trampling experiments found that the type of plant community was a better guide to how badly vegetation suffered than the number of times it was walked on. The authors concluded that even light trampling could be as damaging as heavy use in some habitats. A shortcut that does little harm on a city lawn may therefore leave a lasting scar on a mountainside.

F  Even in cities, desire paths are an imperfect guide. They show where people want to walk, not where it is safe to walk: a well-worn track that leads to a gap in the traffic on a busy road is still dangerous. They also reflect the preferences of the people who use a route most often, so a line that suits fit, hurried commuters may be unusable for wheelchair users or parents pushing buggies, who cannot manage a muddy slope or a high kerb. For this reason, many designers now treat a desire path as the start of an investigation rather than its conclusion. The question it raises is not only where people walk, but whose journeys are missing from the evidence.