Urban trailblazing

[glatt]

I'm an urban trail blazer.

There's a city park that I cut through every day. The designer of the park, years ago, put paved paths in a nice layout surrounding a central fountain. They are nice for winding through the park and looking at the views of the trees and the fountain.

But if you want to walk from one corner of the park, diagonally across to the opposite corner, the paved paths take you way out of your way. The extra time this takes is enough that you miss the walk signal at the opposite end of the park, and have to wait for another cycle of the lights before you can cross the street.

I decided I needed to create a path here, where the red line is.


So one morning, two years ago, when there was a group of fast walking commuters right on my heels, I walked quickly, with determination, right up to the corner where the paved path either goes right or left, and I walked across the pristine grass. I could sense that two people followed me across the grass. I had never seen anybody walk there before.

I kept walking across the grass each morning after that. Most mornings, nobody followed me, but a few mornings some people would.

One morning, about a week or two later, I was at the back of a group of people, and I saw someone ahead of me walk across the grass on their own!

This was in May of 2010. And I took a picture of the grass for a cellar treasure hunt in the "worn" category.


Fast forward to this morning, in May of 2012, and the "grass" path gets more use than the paved paths. It's sometimes crowded on the dirt path now. People are using it a lot. Taking a picture of it is something I have to do on the sly, otherwise people think I'm taking a picture of them.


I feel a little proud, and also a little bad. I totally destroyed this nice patch of grass in a pretty park. But I created an improvement in the infrastructure that hundreds of people use every day. I measured it on Google Earth, and my path only saves 26 feet of walking, but it saves waiting another light cycle to cross the street, so it saves about 2 minutes for a couple hundred people every day.

I don't post this to brag, but I think it's interesting. I don't know of any other documentation by somebody who started one of these cut through paths. You see them all over the place, so there is nothing novel about them. But I figured I would document the process.