WHERE ALMATY WALKS ITS OWN WAY: INFORMAL SHORTCUTS IN OPENSTREETMAP AND THE DETOURS THEY AVOID

Abstract

Desire paths are the worn tracks people make when the planned walking network does not follow the route they want to take. They have been mapped at city scale in the United States, but, to our knowledge, not in Central Asia. Using the open OpenStreetMap database for Almaty (snapshot of 28 September 2026), we tested a simple least-effort prediction: informal shortcuts should appear where the walking network forces a long detour between two points. We first planned to compare city parks, but the map is too sparse for that: only 7 of 127 mapped parks contain any way tagged with an unpaved surface. The test was therefore run city-wide. Of 576 unpaved pedestrian ways, 78 are short enough to be shortcuts (600 m or less), touch the mapped walking network (footways and walkable streets) at both ends, and have a route between their ends. Walking between the two ends of these shortcuts along the network takes a median of 2.16 times the straight-line distance, compared with 1.38 for randomly chosen pairs of network points at the same distance within 1 km of each shortcut (Mann-Whitney z = 4.65 to 5.31 across 20 random baseline draws; matched sign test 56 of 78 above their own baseline, p < 0.001). The median shortcut saves 108 m of walking, and 76 of 78 save distance. The result holds when the length cut-off is changed to 300 m or 1,000 m and when neighbouring shortcuts are grouped. It is consistent with least-effort theory, but it rests on the shortcuts volunteers have mapped, and the most important finding about the data is that most of Almaty's informal paths are not yet on the map.

Keywords: desire paths, pedestrian behaviour, OpenStreetMap, route directness, walkability, Almaty

Как цитировать

Torekhan S. WHERE ALMATY WALKS ITS OWN WAY: INFORMAL SHORTCUTS IN OPENSTREETMAP AND THE DETOURS THEY AVOID // Central Asian Scientific Journal. – 2026. – No. 4(32), Vol. 1. – Pp. 267–271.