BENGALURU: After receiving a lot of positive feedback on Church Street’s pedestrianisation project, the Department of Urban and Land Transport (DULT) is now working on replicating a similar project on three more roads and conduct a Clean Air Street Testbed on other four city roads.
DULT on Friday released the Clean Air Street Testbed Initiative along with ‘Church Street First-impact Assessment of Pedestrianising an Urban Street in Terms of Quality of Life Report’, prepared by the Indian Institute of Science (llSc). Another report titled, ‘Church Street First-Clean Air Street Testbed Report’, prepared by Urbanmorph, too was launched.
V Manjula, DULT Commissioner on the sidelines of releasing the report told TNIE, that the department recently launched a research and innovation policy under which it has been decided to take up similar testbeds on four more streets. The list is, however, yet to be finalised. A pedestrian road works similar to Church Street, are being carried out at Malleswaram 8th Cross, Jayanagar 10th Main and Gandhi Bazaar.
A testbed is a concept where many startups come up with different technologies, ideas, or projects, and wait for feedback before implementing or launching them in the market. Ashish Verma, Associate Professor, Transportation Systems Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering, IISc, said, the study report not only shows the scientific evaluations, but it also throws light on the quality of life.
The report shows clear improvement in air quality on “pedestrianised weekends”, in terms of PM10 and PM2.5 concentrations. Assessing the pedestrian footfalls, from Nov 2020 to Feb 2021, the average daily footfall on Church Street increased by 92 per cent. and the average peak duration footfall increased by 117 per cent.