Factorio Forums

Right now you can step on the clearly protruding underground belt ports and the belts themselves that are above ground as if they're not there. So along those lines, I'm surprised to find I am bothered by the pipes being an obstacle that won't let you go over them. Even with mostly underground pipes, the necessary points where they come above ground even to go right back underground become obstacles. And there ends up being areas where you can't run without being constantly stopped by them since their numbers increase. It also can make it tricky to perform "maintenance" in the area as they become dead ends and hard to find a "path" to what you need.

Any chance of just allowing us to walk over them like you do belts?

While I'm on the topic: it would be a neat addition to allow pipes to be parallel to each other, right next to each other, and not try to "connect" unless (just like belts) you "turn" the pipe into the left or right. Would look really cool to have several parallel pipes above ground instead of below ground just because they are not allowed to run parallel to each other. Right now think it would look better to have more above ground pipes (previous two issues would have to be changed) then as it is now with a bunch of little bumps all over that also interfere with your characters movements.

Just some thoughts.

Not a but idea, but some reasons against that:
Pipes are often used as wall-replacement. There are underground-pipes to avoid that.

For your second suggestion (please only one suggestion per thread): There are mods that allow that already. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Flow%20Control for example. But I'm very sure, that how the pipes are building obstacles is part of the game (see above, they can be used as obstacle).