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.