Yes, they played it that way in the show: 1. To not go straight through the herd (the comic calls them herds because the zombies show a tendency to group up and follow each other.....just follow the crowd behavior) because of the danger. 2. Because it would likely get someone killed trying to protect Eugene and that was played up as weighing on his conscious, like when he listed all the people that had died during his journey, and him lamenting the fact that he's basically worthless compared to all those people.
Spoiler: showI wonder if he did that just to stop Abraham from wanting to plow through Zombietown? Probably not, but that was my first thought.