A lot of universities with large campus grounds take the approach of observing the natural foot traffic wear patterns on grassy areas, and then build walkways where the most worn down parts are.

Its... pretty obvious.

If everyone is taking an alternate, non designed path... your design sucks, modify it to facilitate what people find more effective.

I, unfortunately, have to use GitHub at $DAYJOB and this is me. I navigate most of the webpage via the URL bar now.

Basically, let's say I'm working on a repo github.com/tomato/sauce/ and want to navigate to the Releases page.

Via the webpage:

1. Type github.com into the URL bar.
2. Don't find tomato/sauce/ in the list of recent repos, even though it's the only repo I work on.
3. Click on some other repo that's at least in the tomato/ org.
4. Navigate up to the tomato/ org.
5. Find the sauce/ repo in the list.
6. Traverse half the fucking screen to hit the "Releases" heading in the middle of the About-section.

Via the Firefox URL bar:

1. Type gi→t→s→r→.
2. Hit Enter.

I admit, it's hard to compete with the latter, but I wouldn't know how to navigate that way, if the former wasn't so terrible.

That’s right, it goes in the square hole.

Uhh, so looking carefully at the picture, it appears they shouldn't have bothered with the inner pathway at all, and should have just connected the bridge over the canal (?) in the background to whatever is under the camera.

Not only does the current design fail to provide a short path in demand, it leaves a goofy little boulevard behind the benches in what appears to be a dense, desirable urban area where you shouldn't waste space.

That's ancient.

This is an opportunity with creative landscaping.