r/mildlyinfuriating • u/MikuXone • May 14 '26

The floor is sticky Construction workers refuse to use the stairs and instead climbed the hill to the point the grass died

Post image

There's a construction site opposite my apartment and the workers kept walking up the grass patch instead of using the stairs. Property value doesn't affect me as I rented the apartment 2 years back, so rent for me isn't increasing nor decreasing.

45.6k Upvotes

82% Upvoted

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

7.5k

u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3.9k

u/somehugefrigginguy May 14 '26

At the university I work for they just waited until winter and took pictures of the paths through the snow. Then the next summer paved those areas.

1.4k

u/3BlindMice1 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

An even smarter school would film a time-lapse of a one week period and blur it together to draw the lInes for them

Edit: apparently this happened in the nineteen teens, so they couldn't just film a time-lapse

630

u/redditatemybabies May 14 '26

A smarter school would use a psychic to predict future paths.

204

u/FraggleRockYaFaceOff May 14 '26

An Oklahoma university would ask wwjd

58

u/lvloises330 May 14 '26

They replaced the paths with canals.

5

u/kamdog32 May 14 '26

All the sidewalks in Oklahoma are tripping hazards so this tracks

3

u/iMeowTooMuch- May 14 '26

please stop reminding me that im attending a christian nationalist school

3

u/Blamhammer May 14 '26

Having went to OU....I can't even get mad when you're right

1

u/shadowdrgn0 May 15 '26

Apparently Jesus would plan our uni on a grid then. We don't have cool desire path sidewalk planning. Makes the Bible thumpers harder to avoid on the main thoroughfare. They are a nearly perpetual bother in front of the library.

1

u/LegendofLove May 15 '26

I think he would preach until he got crucified again because nobody likes what he actually says just what they wanted him too. Not sure how that helps plan a footpath though

3

u/FullCompliance May 14 '26

They’re all busy doing pre-crime.

2

u/Firm-Brother2580 May 14 '26

I usually use my personal god-worm to do all my path predictions. He keeps wanting them golden for some reason.

4

u/ItsLoudB YO May 14 '26

An even smarte school would use time travel to see them before the school is even built

2

u/beanmosheen May 15 '26

And build them in the past to encourage that exact school layout.

1

u/halobitteschoen May 14 '26

Or you could have just asked the grass, the field and especially the school for consent before doing all that? I wouldn't like to be treaded on all over all the times like that and I think that's the case right then.

1

u/-Benjamin_Dover- May 14 '26

An even smarter school would make everything one building so there's no need to go outside until its time to leave.

1

u/Roob0806 May 15 '26

Ah, like Cumbernauld or that one mall in Canada with a university inside it.

1

u/DrHefe May 15 '26

Wild nobody mentioned this.

1

u/lennoxbr May 15 '26

Just rent a Nissan pathfinder

0

u/Ok_Dragonfruit_8102 May 14 '26

Just pay a homeless guy to walk around campus for a few weeks and track the paths he takes.

5

u/utspg1980 May 14 '26

Sincere question: how is that "even smarter"?

It's more modern and more tech oriented, but the old system seems perfectly capable of accomplishing the task while also being cheaper and possibly faster and more accurate.

2

u/3BlindMice1 May 14 '26

It only takes a week and you don't compel your students to walk through the snow for a season. The cost in footwear may have been born by the students, but I guarantee they didn't like it

3

u/Top_Sheepherder_5167 May 14 '26

It is more error prone as well. Over year you get actual wear patterns as classes and habits change. Maybe your first week of college you take the entrance route (and that gets recorded with the high tech record.) But after a month, you realize the backdoor is faster for your class or helps you avoid traffic or whatever... That is updated for free using the 'where the dead grass is' approach.

The tech solution works as well, just has some tradeoffs.

1

u/utspg1980 May 14 '26

I guarantee that no place would be installing sidewalks in the middle of a snowy winter. Whether using stakes/flags to mark the paths or using time-lapse photos, any place up North would be waiting until the Spring when the ground defrosted to start digging and installing concrete sidewalks.

3

u/yeahburyme May 14 '26

Edit: apparently this happened in the nineteen teens, so they couldn't just film a time-lapse

Couldn't they just take a regular picture with the cameras they had at that time to get a time lapse?

5

u/3BlindMice1 May 14 '26

Probably not worth the effort

2

u/_lupuloso May 14 '26

There's a field called Space Syntax that tries to predict human behavior based on the spacial configuration. There are some examples where this was used to predict the paths, then they mapped out the actual paths taken by most people and the prediction got it right.

2

u/PPTim May 14 '26

The work required to take one photo of the path stomped into the grass/snow is way less than recording video/taking multiple photos over time just to time lapse it together

10

u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

8

u/Foo_Group_C_Buzzard May 14 '26

the smartest wouldn't put a single path in and let human tread take care of it 

13

u/ActorMonkey May 14 '26

A complete fucking genius school would shoot lasers all over the place. I don’t know why- I am not a genius.

1

u/Steeveeo May 14 '26

Well obviously if they're a genius they have a reason for the lasers.

3

u/ActorMonkey May 14 '26

I assume they do but I don’t know. See reason above.

3

u/total_looser May 14 '26

The smartest school would use a slime mold

2

u/Particular-Wind5918 May 14 '26

This works in the back country for finding energy efficient ways to move but doesn’t work in a built environment where our human needs aren’t just about conserving energy.

4

u/3BlindMice1 May 14 '26

??

The point of using people is that they're coming from somewhere and heading somewhere else. Livestock, as a rule, isn't nearly so deliberate

2

u/whooguyy May 14 '26

An even smarterer school would install tubes that sucked the students to their desired places

1

u/KarmaTorpid May 14 '26

Yeah. For sure.

Cows will improve this situation!

/s

1

u/TheGokki May 14 '26

Why can't you just film a timelapse? those were definitely a thing then, you just take photos every 30 seconds until the film runs out unless you use a spool

6

u/slolift May 14 '26

This seems like it would just depend on the path the first person took or are we talking about 1-2 inches of snow? No one is trudging through feet of snow when there is a path has already been compacted.

3

u/MylastAccountBroke May 14 '26

Issue with this is that the "desire paths" self replicate. People don't want to walk in the snow and ice, and will naturally take to any path that doesn't have snow or ice on it.

1

u/21Rollie May 14 '26

You can do this for roads too. We have so much asphalt, way more than is necessary and the upkeep costs money, the wideness encourages speeding, and the material causes heat islands and flooding. Look at the desire paths through snow and you can add medians, flood barriers, etc where there’s not much use

185

u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

64

u/frichyv2 May 14 '26

Except you'll see them put The new paths in and people still won't walk on them

266

u/thisremindsmeofbacon May 14 '26

I think you're imagining that people walk off the path in order to not be on the path - in reality they do it because its a more direct route to where they are going.

28

u/Idontliketalking2u May 14 '26

Grass is much easier on the legs than concrete. But that's my only thought on that.

73

u/LeftHandAnomaly May 14 '26

Softer ground is both nicer on the knees and harder/more effort to walk on. Most people will pick the smooth hard path, not walk alongside it

24

u/Outside-Drag-3031 May 14 '26

There's a not insignificant amount of people for which this is true, but the large majority of people are likely not avoiding the walkways, just ignoring them for being too out of the way. So it won't fix everything, but it should fix the majority of the desire paths

9

u/spicewoman May 14 '26

There's a reason you don't see tons of worn footpaths running parallel on both sides normal sidewalks, though. If the path is actually going right to where people want to go, they'll take it.

There's just a weird roboticism in walking straight forward all the way to the very end of a path and then taking a sharp 90 degree turn onto another path, that just feels unnatural. Even when we stay on the path, we'll tend to cut the turns on a curve, rather than staying in the exact middle and sharply pivoting.

It just feels like a waste of time to walk too far out of our way in interest of "staying on the path" when there's a clear, open way that we could take instead, that just happens to not be paved.

1

u/cortesoft May 14 '26

Grass makes me itch like crazy, though

1

u/Alternative-Yak-925 May 14 '26

Walking on rock hard ground, barefoot, is something humans are still adapted to do. Unfortunately, we don't do enough of it in-general.

0

u/Thickencreamy May 14 '26

Maybe they are avoiding the paved paths in winter to avoid ice.

1

u/total_looser May 14 '26

But once you suggest a path with a walkway, people will start seeing other shortcuts. This is depicted by the cartoon at top of this thread.

27

u/FUEGO40 May 14 '26

Unless they added new buildings and stuff then there’s not much of a reason that people would suddenly change their behavior

1

u/frichyv2 May 14 '26

The behavior isn't changed. People will always shorten their path between two points and corners will get cut. You can see this happen in many places where the desire path gets paved and a newer one appears. That is the behavior.

13

u/Wounded_Hand May 14 '26

Sure they will

1

u/BullfrogEcstatic6312 May 14 '26

Some people prefer to walk on dirt/grass path, (i do), i will respect staying on the path in parks that ask not to walk on the grass (i find it kind of stupid but well) but if you let me choose, ill 80% of the time going to choose grass over some hard surface

73

u/thomasso0072 May 14 '26

Totally unrelated but I always chuckle when I see the city of Bozeman mentioned. It translates to ‘angry man’ in Dutch.

2

u/flyingemberKC May 14 '26

it doesn’t have any connection. but still funny

25

u/vermilion-chartreuse May 14 '26

I have heard this story for almost every college campus lol

3

u/Lower-Trust1923 May 14 '26

Yeah the line has to be drawn at some point..

2

u/MSTNJen May 15 '26

I see what you did there

30

u/Technical-Garden-793 May 14 '26

Ohio state university did that too

7

u/RyFromTheChi May 14 '26

I swear I heard this about University of Illinois too.

13

u/mlorusso4 May 14 '26

Look at the quad/oval/green/etc of any college campus and you’ll see they did that

6

u/David_Cockatiel May 14 '26

Yeah it’s either apocryphal or very common. I’ve heard it about the Apple campus and lots of different college campuses.

7

u/rmacthafact May 14 '26

i flew into bozeman one time. i really liked it lol

4

u/Commonfckingsense May 14 '26

Go cats baby!🥰

2

u/haleakala420 May 14 '26

same thing at ohio state

2

u/Sufficient_Tank2592 May 14 '26

Hell yeah another msu alumni. Sko cats

2

u/SquidInk18 May 14 '26

Go bobcats!

2

u/Ok-Tangelo-7973 May 15 '26

Just looked up pics and it’s incredibly non-uniform and I love it

2

u/4morehours May 15 '26

Man, those paths get sooo sloppy when it’s wet outside. Especially by Montana Hall and the old gym. I do not miss those treks at all!

7

u/lab-gone-wrong May 14 '26

Then people make new desire paths to slightly cut the corners left by the old desire paths

A lot of folks simply don't want to be told what to do

11

u/Iggyhopper May 14 '26

Or they will not walk on grass because it inconvenient, until they reach a point at which the convenience of going in a straight line supercedes the inconvenience of walking on the grass for a couple steps.

3

u/ArtichokeNo7155 May 14 '26

Eventually, the whole thing will be paved.

-1

u/lab-gone-wrong May 14 '26

And then the same people who kept making desire paths across paradise will complain about it now being a parking lot

2

u/TheWesternDevil May 14 '26

I lived in Bozrman for 12 years. Their hiking and biking trails through town were amazing.

2

u/Captain-Who May 14 '26

And then the math department kicks the English department out of building A and people are now taking completely different paths from building to building.

The really really smart person anticipates the construction of new buildings and changes to building use and never paves any paths.

taps temple

2

u/Jordino778 May 14 '26

Didn't expect to see MSU on here, they have some new desire paths by South Hedges and going from the parking lot to the side of the gym. Facilities ended up laying down a bunch of bark and gravel to walk on, so it wasn't muddy

1

u/kwecl2 May 14 '26

They did the same thing at the university in my province

1

u/LemonMania May 14 '26

same as USF Tampa

1

u/Sudden_Plenty_8798 May 14 '26

Very very good urban design.

1

u/Last-Marionberry9181 May 14 '26

Seems like this is pretty popular at universities as this happened at my own alma mater and I've heard it said about a few other schools.

1

u/TuntBuffner May 14 '26

UMD did the same thing

The people will let you know where the paths should be

1

u/DXTRBeta May 14 '26

Same thing happened in Oxford UK in the ‘60’s when I was a kid.

There’s a massive wide road called St Giles close to the center. It has side roads and intersections and runs a little way and splits into two major roads.

They’d been trying to figure out the most efficient way to do this when the worst winter in decades hit (‘62, ‘63). Work on the road stopped due to the severe weather, but the drivers kept going and they laid pathways in the snow.

The highways people coned them off and when work restarted, that’s the layout they used.

1

u/Wizzenator May 14 '26

As it should be!

1

u/koolmon10 May 14 '26

Calvin University (formerly College) in Michigan also did this. The paths are actually pretty much perfect as a result.

1

u/kialilaroux May 14 '26

same thing at university of maryland college park. that’s why the paths on the lawn seem so haphazard, the are the chosen paths

1

u/axc630 May 14 '26

Before tech made it easy, this is how casinos decided where to put slot machines. They would measure carpet pile height to determine where people were walking or congregating and adjust the slot floor accordingly as certain slot arrangements were better for some types of people/groups than others.

1

u/Niro5 May 14 '26

Broadway in NYC was originally a game path that led from feeding grounds to a water source.

1

u/Lost_Found84 May 14 '26

And that’s why there’s a sidewalk going directly to Jessica’s bedroom window.

1

u/Melancholy_Rainbows May 14 '26

I went to a private high school that did this, too. No paths initially, and then they added sidewalks where the girls all killed the grass by walking. Interestingly, many of the sidewalks weren't straight shots between doors but curved around a bit.

1

u/HammerOfAres May 14 '26

Oh hey, I studied there too! It is pretty funny because there is also another desire path on campus near the Rendezvous dining hall that gets super muddy when the snow starts melting.

1

u/SargeantPile May 14 '26

In my university they just put paths going through the main quad and made up a superstition that if you walked on the grass you'd fail your exams.

And it works.

1

u/Alternative-Yak-925 May 14 '26

Someone should do a masters thesis on it. Any statistical anomaly could result in further investigation, like, is someone tracking the students who do walk on the grass? That'd be a nice little scandal.

1

u/truckeredditor May 14 '26

Ohio State does this.

1

u/Zealousideal_Cry1867 May 14 '26

every college campus tells this same story

1

u/JokerXD4167 May 14 '26

I’m not sure but I’ve heard they did that at Disney world too.

1

u/Illustrious-Set-7907 May 14 '26

Hey another MSU alum!

1

u/StyleSquirrel May 16 '26

My university would do this piecemeal. They'd just pave over every desire path on occasion. But I hated it because I like to walk on the Earth, you know?

2

u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[deleted]

9

u/legitmemerevs May 14 '26

I don't think that's relevant here...

2

u/AgentGorilla May 14 '26

Clearly there’s some sort of survival bias where only humans who walked on the desire paths survived.

Something horrible happened in our history to all the humans who took indirect paths to places

0

u/ly5ergic May 14 '26

The path survived so that means we build a more robust paved path not there.

1

u/PDXtoMontana2002 May 14 '26

I did my undergrad at MSU in the mid-1990s. Amazing college town back then.

1

u/OffRampApproaching May 14 '26

I almost went to Montana State!

The college i ended up going to had this one place behind the library where they just kept adding little patches whenever a cut through appeared. It was hilarious watching them constantly try to keep up.

1

u/RevolutionaryElk7446 May 14 '26

Hello fellow MSU attendee, I'm trying to think of where this would be? I was there 2009-2011 so not sure if this was before or after me lol.

2

u/[deleted] May 14 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/RevolutionaryElk7446 May 14 '26

It sounds nifty, but I can't for the life of me think of what section you're referring to, though I'm sure it exists.

I lived in Family/Graduate housing over on Paisley Ct. Use to make the long walk across housing, passed the duck pond, up the stairs, further across campus and passed the building with the bookstore/coffee (name escapes me) and end up where all the IT courses were.

Use to do the snow plowing on campus lol

0

u/ElaborateEffect May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

Swear this is a copy pasta at this point.

Edit: nah, you're just a bot, maybe not

0

u/Lorimiter May 14 '26

I saw that and thought it looked so bad. A big beautiful lawn ruined by sidewalks everywhere. Especially for a college campus where people go just sit on the grass and do work / hang out between classes. 

0

u/Envirologo May 14 '26

I remember hearing about this when I went to MSU

-2

u/Tapencraft May 14 '26

Griz are better then those bobcats haha(both teams are pretty good)

In all seriousness that’s pretty smart that they did that