After this week’s blizzard buried New York City sidewalks under mountains of plowed snow, pedestrians did what New Yorkers do best: they found their own way.

Walk down any avenue and you’ll see them — narrow cuts carved through snowbanks by boots and determination. These unofficial shortcuts, which let people cross mid-block instead of trudging to the corner crosswalk, have a name that sounds more like poetry than urban planning: desire paths.

Times photographers Anna Kodé and Amir Hamja documented the phenomenon across the city this week, capturing how residents refused to let snow dictate their routes. The carved passages appear wherever the official path — the shoveled sidewalk leading to regulated crosswalks — felt too long or indirect for daily life.

“Desire paths are inherently subversive,” Kodé writes. “They remind us that we have a choice, and that we can veer away from what was laid out for us.”

The concept extends beyond winter weather. Those dirt trails that cut across Central Park’s grass, offering shortcuts between paved walkways, are desire paths too. They show up anywhere humans decide the official route doesn’t match how they actually want to move through space.

A traffic engineer explained the appeal to The Times back in 2003: desire paths “indicate yearning.” They represent collective dissatisfaction with existing design, evidence that planners got something wrong about how people really use space.

The term carries weight that typical transportation jargon lacks. Unlike “pedestrian flow patterns” or “traffic optimization,” desire paths acknowledge the human longing behind urban movement. They’re proof that city planning isn’t just about efficiency — it’s about recognizing how residents actually live.

In 1982, author William Least Heat-Moon captured similar sentiment in “Blue Highways,” his account of traveling America’s back roads after losing his job and ending his marriage in 1978. Those blue-marked secondary routes on old highway maps offered alternatives to interstate efficiency, paths chosen for reasons beyond speed.

“A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go,” Heat-Moon wrote about his decision to take a 13,000-mile road trip.

As temperatures rise and this week’s snow melts away, the physical desire paths will disappear. But they’ll return with the next storm, carved again by residents whose daily routes don’t match what urban planners had in mind.

The temporary trails serve as annual reminders that cities belong to the people who walk them, not just the officials who design them.