Relevance: Mains: G.S paper I: Urbanization: developmental issues, urbanization, their problems and their remedies.
Two of the top five most congested cities in the world are in India. Mumbai, in fact, has the worst traffic flow in the world. Delhi is marginally better. An average commute during peak hours in Mumbai takes 65 per cent more time while it takes 58 per cent longer in Delhi.
Delhi has 1,749 kilometres (km) of road length per hundred square km, which is one of the highest road densities in India. This gives the city another ‘gift’. The number of vehicles in Delhi comes out to be more than one crore.
A high road density has been accompanied by a high number of people owning a vehicle in Delhi. This has happened as the street design has itself favoured personal vehicles at the expense of non-motorised and pedestrian commuters.
According to the 2011 India Census, about 23 per cent of work trips happen on foot, 13 per cent on bicycle and 18 per cent on public transport, with only 15 per cent of trips on private transport.
This raises the question of equity. We need to ask by what logic is an overwhelming majority of the street space being dedicated to 15 per cent of the traffic.
The same traffic that is responsible for 40 per cent of Delhi’s air pollution, is responsible for immeasurable amount of working hours lost due to congestion and has single-handedly killed 1,562 people last year in Delhi alone.
Why do we still keep the sidewalk width to a miserable bare minimum along with no dedicated space for bicycles while private transport is given a free reign to run havoc?
A lesser discussed issue in street design is that the streets ‘need to be useful’. If one happens to zoom in on the Delhi street grid map, one might notice that due to the unplanned, ad-hoc nature of planning, Delhi street grids do not align from one neighbourhood to the other, often ending in dead-ends or T junctions, which increases the destination-origin distance.
A study indicates that people often prefer ways with less amount of turns. A longer but less complicated way to the destination may be preferred by a commuter to a shorter but more complicated way. The non-alignment of streets thus makes people take the longer way, reducing the usefulness of neighbourhood streets.
This is further combined with the land zoning in the cities where the everyday commercial activities are segregated and pushed away from walkable distances, further cutting down the usefulness of the streets.
The planning needs to not just ensure a hassle-free non-motorised commute but also question the need for the commute in itself by ensuring everyday commercial and leisure activity spaces to be located within walkable distances.