On the need for Pedestrian Spaces

The recent news that four hundred kilometres of roads in Bangalore are to be widened makes sad reading. Much of this widening would be at the cost of footpaths and their umbrageous trees in the older localities. And such beautiful trees cannot be wished for even with a magic wand, while a road or a building can happen overnight with a politician’s wave!

This widening affects some one hundred and forty roads for the time being. We have some thousand eight hundred or so kilometres of roads in Bangalore. What we are losing amounts to nearly a quarter of the road length that we have today. 

What is tragic is that we are losing the one single feature which characterises the walking space anywhere. That is the shade giving trees which go with it. Be it a park, a garden or a footpath, it is the trees that make the walk more pleasureable. Yes, we do require good surfaces too, especially for the aged, but trees literally provide the icing on the cake. And everywhere, tyrants are bringing down the trees, either through policy or bad planning. 

Take Lalbagh, where literally tens of thousands of people come everyday for their walk.  It is having its trees removed or killed blatantly. The recent killing of a healthy Eucalyptus citriodora in its prime, by the construction of a strangling concrete platform around it, only elicited some silly explanations when pressed for by the press. A concrete construction at the cost of a healthy genetic resource tree? It looks all the more silly if we realise that Eucalypts cross-hybridise very easlily. What you breed here will never be genetically like the first generation introduced tree, which it was.  But the sad fact is that we are laying barren what could have been the pride of any city: a garden!

Road widening is supposed to help traffic flows. But here, it is invariably at the cost of the already penalised pedestrian who literally has no walking space. If we look at the casualty figures for road accidents, one would find that more than half of all accident deaths in the country, is that of pedestrians. Any other group affected accounts for less than a seventh of this number. In Bombay, our most crowded city, pedestrians account for some eighty percent of all road casualty cases. Even on our inter-city roads and highways, pedestrians account for nearly half the number of fatal accidents.

Funnily, this makes me wonder if pedestrians are protected at all. Just imagine, if we had allowed all the footpath trees to remain, we would not have had the wayward vehicles and SUVs ploughing into people, running along footpaths and causing mass deaths that we keep hearing about in the news these days!

Recollect those old days where a school child could happily weave its way on the footpath, shielded from the whizzing traffic by the giant footpath trees that were the silent sentinels?  You too would have perhaps walked home with gay abandon, passing tree trunk after tree trunk, never realising that each of those massive trees could instantly stop a wayward vehicle in its tracks!

It is tragic that we would be never letting  the next generation enjoy that previlege of either walking along a footpath, walking under a tree, or have a native defence against wayward vehicles. It is also equally tragic that any intelligent protest falls on such deaf ears!

 

[2008-11-03]