When you are walking, you will take a straight line to where you want to go. When a path requires you to go from A to B along two sides of a triangle you don’t take that path, unless there is an officious notice saying “Keep off the Grass”, or a fence bars your way. No, you choose to take the short cut, the hypotenuse of the triangle.

It is a common sight to observe an informal footpath of bare earth across nice green grass, or people crossing a road not on the pedestrian crossing which is a few metres away. We are seeing Pythagorean homo sapiens in action.

That shortest route is also called the Desire Line, which has a rather romantic ring to it (though if you look up desire lines on Wikipedia there are other more down-to-earth names such as herd paths, pig trails or bootleg trails). It is a term used widely in urban and transport planning.

Planners sometimes forget that we all naturally take the desire line, and devise attractive routes that meander gently and looks aesthetically pleasing and chic. People will just take a short cut and then ruin the carefully trimmed grass as they make the direct traverse. There is something nicely anarchic in creating that new route, defying rules, snubbing authority, being natural, which is quite pleasing.

Those of us on bikes have the same tendency to make that bee-line. In towns, that is often manifest by cyclists going directly across squares, cutting off the corner of pavements when turning left, or sweeping across junctions when turning right, annoying other road users. But this is because roads are designed for motorised transport and are not designed for cycling, so rules tend to be broken.

Urban designers and transport planners need to take into account the way cyclists behave when redesigning roads and building new developments. A company called Copenhagenize Design Co has developed a methodology to analyse urban behaviour. This explores the details of bicycle users and how they interact with other traffic users and the existing urban design. This is nicely termed urban anthropology.

Understanding cyclists’ behaviour helps make the design of intersections and open spaces more appropriate to two wheels than four, with the aim of mitigating what is seen as bad cycling behaviour through good design principles. Understanding desire lines of cyclists is a key to designing infrastructure in cities and ensuring that they match the natural behaviours of cyclists in their urban environment.

Their study of the behaviour of people on bikes has categorised cyclists into Conformists, Momentumists and Recklists. While trying to be a Conformist, I realise there are occasions when I am a Momentumist as a traffic light goes orange as I approach, and I hate to admit there have been occasions when I might be categorised as a Recklist by a critical observer, but generally a cyclist will conform to one of these classifications. Whether Conformist, Momentumist, or Recklist, future urban roads must be designed for us cyclists.When anthro- pologists come back to study us in our natural environment in 50 years’ time we will have all turned into Conformists as there will be no need to take that short cut, it will have been designed in already for you! Let’s dream….