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keiferski | on: Guerrilla bike lanes: San Francisco makes illicit infrastructure permanent (2016)
That's essentially a desire path, in crosswalk form:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_path

robaato | parent | next
The architect Christopher Alexander documented this in "Alexander, C. (1975). The Oregon Experiment. New York: Oxford University Press" - one of the foundations for the whole Pattern Language movement which strongly influenced software design.
jraph | parent
Actively painting the desire path is next level though ':)
c7b | root | parent
There's a cool project where desire paths were intentionally planned and paved later: https://popupcity.net/radar/elephant-paths-paving-the-way-fo...
jraph | root | parent
It's not the first time I run into this idea, it's indeed probably a great way to design paths!
OuterVale | root | parent
Pretty good way to design software, too. See what users do, then make that thing or make it better.

Of course, this is isn't perfect -- the user doesn't always know what they want.