BENGALURU: The Karnataka government and its agencies are looking in the wrong direction while planning and making promises about Bengaluru’s development, or turning the state capital into a global city with underground tunnel roads and sky deck to attract tourists. Ensuring safe, well-designed, well-maintained footpaths do not seem to be anywhere on their radar.
This, despite experts stressing that at least 45% of road deaths are those of pedestrians, and these occur as they are forced to walk on roads in the absence of safe footpaths.
How indifferent the state government and its agencies are towards developing footpaths in Bengaluru is evident from this: At many places, it is government bodies which have encroached upon footpaths by setting up toilets, drinking water plants, transformers, traffic police kiosks and vehicles seized by police parked on footpaths.
Moreover, due to lack of coordination among various parastatal bodies and private players, footpaths and roads are dug up, and relaying them ignored. Let alone government agencies, without any strict monitoring by Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), even telecom companies dig up footpaths and never bother to relay them, several citizens The New Indian Express spoke to have pointed out.
When roads are dug up by the parastatal bodies, footpaths are the most affected as debris and construction material are dumped, eating into the already narrow footpaths in the city, wherever they exist. Many footpath stretches are mere urinal spots, smoking addas or garbage dumps, pushing pedestrians straight on to roads and in the path of speeding vehicles.
Secretary of Brigade Shops and Establishments Suhail Yusuf complains that footpaths are encroached by illegal hawkers. “Many vendors have set up permanent structures on footpaths and are illegally getting power supply directly from the line. BBMP is not acting against them. Footpaths are also used by many auto drivers to park their vehicles,” Yusuf says.
Prof Ashish Verma, convener, IISc Sustainable Transportation (IST) Lab, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), says, “With a lack of footpaths, pedestrians are forced to walk on roads leading to accidents, and deaths. Unfortunately, we don’t have any agency that enforces the right of way of pedestrians on footpaths. In Bengaluru, pedestrians are among vulnerable road users, with almost 45% of road accident-related deaths being those of pedestrians.” There are standards on how footpaths should be built by the Indian Roads Congress. Verma says, “Footpaths are crucial in urban mobility.
Walking is an active mode that has its associated benefits, and therefore good quality footpaths should be present in every road section in cities and every junction and road crossing should have provision for safe pedestrian crossing.” He says a good footpath helps people shun their private vehicles. “It helps adopt walking as the main mode or access mode to transit. In simple terms, we increase the attractiveness of walking by having quality and safe infrastructure for pedestrians,” he explains, stressing that BBMP should keep walking infrastructure as the top priority in terms of interventions and have a substantial budget allocation for footpath building and maintenance.