Beds or paths

I've been having a nosey through some of the garden/allotment images and wondered when you were planning your spaces what was the driving factor when determining your size of beds. There's a huge mix, some with smaller beds and some with massive beds, some raised some just edged, some more free-flowing. 

I remember when I had my allotment, my paths were quite narrow only about 500mm wide, too narrow for a wheelbarrow for example. I had 12 beds, in the cross of St George, with a couple of extra vertical dissections on all 4 white corner squares, the red cross was paths. My beds were long about 14 metres in length and about 1.5 metres wide too wide to reach the centre when casting seeds, for example, so I had to trample the beds, and too long when I needed to fetch water. My plot was bordered by raised planters in an L section which were 500mm high, I did this to minimise weeding the path edges, but it also only gave me three access points as one end of the cross was against a fence. It was like being trapped in a maze!!.

I think I was influenced by my father a bit too much to be honest when I was setting it up as he thought raised beds were a bad idea he preferred open ground to turn over but, as I was set on beds as I wanted to break it down into manageable sections that I could recover bit by bit, he did, however, influence them being very long.

I always thought I didn't have enough pathways but, over the 300sqm plot I had 25.8% given up to paths, which really shocked me when I just worked it out, 1/4 of my growing space grew nothing but weeds. No wonder I seemed to spend some much time trying to tend the edges.

So what were your planning thoughts, and if you worked it out how much of your space is actually growing area? Do your best not to guess try and work it out, it's honestly really quite scary.