Desire Paths

Open road

By Melissa Kirsch

After a blizzard in New York City, a pedestrian accustomed to crossing the street mid-block may find herself barricaded in, banks of plowed snow creating a fortress, forcing her to walk the length of the shoveled sidewalk to the crosswalk, as the urban planners intended. Follow the grid, same as everyone else, no shortcuts.

That is, unless someone has, mercifully, carved an incursion into the snow bank, creating a makeshift means of egress, a way out. These unofficial trails that permit deviation from the prescribed route are known as "desire paths." Desire paths (or, sometimes, "desire lines") show up after snowstorms, as my colleagues Anna Kodé and Amir Hamja documented this week, but you can find them anywhere humans have decided the official trail is too indirect: 

Those dirt trails that branch off paved walkways in parks, offering a shorter route from A to B, are desire paths, too. Has there ever been a more romantic name for a traffic pattern? . . .

The word desire has an ache in it. That's why its application to a trail deviating from a snowy sidewalk is so affecting — it's not just that I'd prefer to walk some other way, but I have a deep longing for another way. Imagine the planning commission meeting in which bureaucrats discuss desire paths in between more mundane-sounding plans for rezoning the waterfront and building a bus stop. Desire is so tender, so intimate, so individual. . . .

As the snow melts in the city and the physical desire paths go with it, I'm considering the simmering desire, mine and others', to make new, metaphorical paths, to cut lines through drifts that are walling us in, to create new ways out when the old ones no longer suffice.

From: The New York Times <nytdirect@nytimes.com>   (email)
Date: Sat, Feb 14, 2026 at 6:02 AM
Subject: The Morning: Desire paths