My town has a little shopping centre a ways outside of the town. It's an American style shopping centre (I live in Sweden) so it has a huge parking lot, and a massive building stretching a long span with lots of shops and some fast food restaurants. My previous vet is located there.

To get there, you had to go on a small pedestrian road, without a dedicated bicycle lane, there was a exit ramp from the motorway, and the pedestrian path had no proper crossing. Then there was a bridge over the highway, and a really long swooping path you had to follow to get to the big centre so you could finally cross the perilous parking lot and whatever. There was thankfully a desire path you could take, since they have a tendency to crop up when actual infrastructure fails us.

Enjoy my rubbish illustration of this.

The black bit is the car road, the brown is the pedestrian path. It's obviously simplified, but you get the idea. I'm coming from the roundabout in the bottom, the shopping centre is up the top to the left.

Some years ago my town announced that they'd redo this entire stretch of road. It's a multiple year project. They're adding more roundabouts, and they were going to improve the lane for pedestrians. This lead to pedestrians and cyclists not having direct access anymore, because the path took 1½ years to complete. You had to go around the entire thing.

Anyway, with this improvement, they announced that the pedestrian path would be wider, it'd be placed differently, and it'd go under the road. Hooray, we'll be able to go directly to the centre rather than follow the ridiculously swoopy road. Right? Right?

Enter illustration two. The... purple-ish path is how I envisioned it'd go (imagine that it goes under the road). Instead we got basically the same path, but much wider, and where before it went over the motorway off-ramp, it now goes under it, does a god damn pirouette and resumes right next to the fucking road! They somehow fucking managed to make it longer!

It used to be about a two kilometre stretch. Not so bad, but felt awful to walk by. They've managed to add on an extra ~300 metres for no reason whatsoever. At the very least it is wider, you can comfortably have people walking and cycling on the road, and it is further from the road so it doesn't feel like you're walking among the cars anymore.