When that path was first created it wouldn’t have been faster, because you would have been cutting across much much more grass. That’s why desire paths often migrate.

Also, it feels somewhat comfortable to walk in the optical centre between two objects, here the pole of the street light on the left and the tree on the right.

Looks like marauders lurking on the right hand path. I'd take the center path too.

Cutting the curve more to the left isn’t the fastest path for bicycles, and you can clearly see a bicycle rut. Unless I’m misunderstanding the title, of course.

The photo is taken directly in the center of the path. If someone is riding a bicycle at some speed, they would have to ride over the conjoining other path and aim left to cut the curve any deeper.

Then they would have less momentum going into the grass because of the slight grass berm of the converging paths, the act of (lightly) turning, and additional grass to pedal through at the end of the cut.

It also looks like it curves toward the right a bit at the end of the path because of a light grassy hill? Which would be not great on a bike.

I didn’t mean to post twice! My bad