Desire Paths: Ontario's Unofficial Trail Networks

There is a path near you that nobody designed.

It runs across a corner of grass where the sidewalk turns, or slips through a gap in a hedge between a school and a plaza, or drops down a ravine slope at an angle no engineer would have signed off on. It has no name and no budget. It appears on no map. And it exists because enough people, independently and without discussing it, decided that the official route was wrong.

These are desire paths, and once you start seeing them, you cannot stop.

A path with many names

The phenomenon is universal enough that nearly every walking culture has named it. In Germany they are trampelpfade, trample paths. In the Netherlands, olifantenpaden, elephant trails. In France, chemins de l'âne, donkey paths. In Japan, kemonomichi, beast trails. English-language planners tend to say desire lines or social trails; recreation ecologists prefer informal trails. The writer Robert Macfarlane, who has spent a career attending to the language of landscape, calls them "free-will ways".

The formation threshold is remarkably low. Researchers estimate a path can become visible after as few as fifteen trips across the same ground — at which point it starts advertising itself, and the visible trace recruits the next walker, who deepens it for the one after that.

What drives the routing turns out to be measurable. A 2025 study in Building and Environment modelled spontaneous trail formation in urban green spaces and concluded that pedestrians are subconsciously optimising for the lowest metabolic energy demand — not the shortest distance, but the cheapest one for a body to walk. The paths are not laziness. They are arithmetic, performed by feet.

Persistent disobedience

Planners have understood the informational value of these paths for a long time. Landscape architect Lawrence Halprin was arguing in the 1960s and 70s for user-centred design that observed how people actually moved before laying anything down, and desire line analysis — mapping the informal trails, then designing the formal ones to match — is now standard practice in landscape architecture.

What is less standard is accepting the answer when it arrives. The most instructive research finding on this concerns what happens when a desire path is closed. A study documented pedestrian behaviour across three stages: both routes available, initial closure with signage, and long-term closure. Use of the desire path dropped sharply when the signs went up, exactly as intended. Then, over the following months, use of the closed path increased fourfold. The researchers called it "persistent disobedience, or sticky behavior".

The path won. It usually does, given time.

What Ontario's paths are saying

Toronto's ravine system is the largest of its kind in any city in North America, and it is threaded with informal trails. The City's own Ravine Strategy, adopted in 2017, was candid about the dynamic: without adequate investment and access, people will continue to create unsanctioned trails and accesses, worsening erosion. The 2026 implementation update lists management of informal trails as ongoing work, alongside seed sourcing and restoration monitoring.

There is a detail in that 2017 strategy worth pausing on. It notes that roughly 30,000 students used the ravines each year through formal and informal programs, and names the Forest Valley and Hillside Outdoor Education Centres and the Toronto Urban Studies Centre as examples of the formal side of that access.

In May 2026, the TDSB closed or discontinued programming at all but two of its outdoor education centres, including Forest Valley and the Toronto Urban Studies Centre. The structured, supervised, curriculum-linked way into those ravines narrowed considerably. The desire is not going to narrow with it. That demand does not evaporate when the programming ends — it just stops being routed.

The part where they are also a problem

It would be easy to write desire paths as pure folk wisdom versus bureaucratic stupidity. The ecology does not permit it.

Informal trails cause measurable damage: vegetation loss, soil compaction, erosion. Research by Ballantyne and Pickering found that while the per-metre impact of informal and formal trails is broadly similar, informal networks account for greater cumulative vegetation loss simply because there is so much more of them. They also fragment habitat, and they proliferate — one becomes three becomes a braided mess.

The sharpest illustration comes from Webster Woods, an 82.5-hectare protected area near central Boston, long used as a textbook case of fragmentation. In a study published by Richard Primack and Carina Terry, researchers found that during the first four months of the COVID-19 pandemic, hikers and cyclists created 4.9 kilometres of new social trails — a 36 per cent increase, roughly matching what had accumulated over the previous forty-eight years. Interior habitat dropped from 3.2 hectares to 2.1.

Four months. Half the remaining interior of the woods.

Reading them properly

Here is the finding that reframes the whole question. An Australian study of recreational trails in endangered urban forest examined why people went off-trail, and found that across every user group the motivation was overwhelmingly positive attraction rather than impatience: a view, a chance to explore, a wish to see flora and fauna up close.

People are not shortcutting past nature. They are trying to get closer to it.

The researchers' recommendation was not enforcement. It was to concentrate use onto a limited number of well-established informal paths, routed away from sensitive vegetation — to read the desire, then design for it, rather than pretending it away and absorbing the erosion anyway.

Which is what a desire path has been telling us all along. It is not a transgression. It is a public comment period, conducted in mud, by people who were never invited to the consultation.

Now go look

Start noticing them on your own street. The corner cut by the bus stop. The slope worn bare behind the school. The gap in the fence that has been there so long the fence has given up.

Photograph one and share it with us — tag Project: ReWild on Instagram so we can see what your neighbourhood is asking for. We're building our community over there, and this is exactly the kind of looking we want to do together.

Somebody voted with their feet. The least we can do is read the ballot.