The Pune Miror has an interesting article on a study conducted by the Maharashtra Police on highway accidents in India. Simply put, the results are startling.
Here Pedestrians hold back traffic after painting a sidewalk on the street. Photo from Friendlyghost.
Krishnaraj Rao lives in Borivli, a suburb of Mumbai known for its famous Sanjay Gandhi National Park, and, more recently, its residents who have taken to the streets demanding that pedestrians be treated with respect. Along with Mr. Santosh Jangam, a bookseller turned activist, Mr. Rao is the head of a movement called Sahasi Padayatri which is leading a grassroots campaign on behalf of pedestrian rights in Mumbai. Through this movement he has been engaged in a variety of initiatives and non-violent agitations to improve conditions for pedestrians; he has demarcated lanes for pedestrians on streets where pedestrians compete with buses, cars and motorcycles due to the lack of walkable footpaths and he has dumped rubbish blocking pedestrian areas at the steps of local government office buildings to raise awareness of the obstacles facing pedestrians. This weekend I had the chance to correspond with him by email. Below is the interview.
How have cars and motorbikes changed Mumbai’s streets?
Cars and motorbikes – especially the former – represent the prevalence of speed, brute force and money power in our society. They represent a constant threat to those who don’t have these vehicles, and subtly divide people into haves and have-nots. By virtue of being seated in an automobile, one feels one has a divine right to make hundreds of other people scurry out of his way as he approaches. I feel this mentality needs to be curbed for the good of society.
At what point did you realize that pedestrians were being forced off the roads? Has it been a long process, or has it happened rapidly?
Personally, realization of this fact dawned only in the past year, when, because of my concern about climate change, I began increasingly to leave my car parked and go out walking or using public transport.
But I do realize that this erosion of the pedestrians’ right to walk safely has been gradual over the past two decades. I recognize now that the motorist’s ability to honk a blaring horn and to subtly threaten to run down someone who obstructs him has skewed the balance. The pedestrian, by contrast, endlessly adjusts and modifies his path, peacefully yields the centre of the road to moving vehicles and the roadside to parked vehicles etc. The pedestrian rarely protests – and this has been his undoing. Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by James Cridland.
In ancient Indian and Chinese texts, writers noted that the ultimate form of torture involved subjecting captives to loud and horrible noises. It’s an interesting paradox that we now live in the modern world as free citizens, and all we need to do is stroll down the street to be exposed to noise loud enough to become physically ill, elevating our blood pressure to unhealthy levels, interfering with our sleeping patterns, and causing a whole host of stress related diseases.
On the majority of roads in cities like Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi, noise pollution can measure nearly 80-90 decibels during peak hours. That’s roughly the equivalent of standing just 15 feet from a passing freight train! Noise levels above 80 decibels are detrimental to healthy hearing and the Australian EPA suggests that prolonged exposure to noise at or above this level can cause deafness. It’s such a serious problem that researchers in the EU found that the social cost of noise pollution for that region is 0.4% of total GDP. In Indian city’s it must be a lot worse. (For normal tension free conversation one requires a background noise level less than 55 decibels.) Read the rest of this entry »
Photo by MumbaiDailySnapshot.
From the Boston Globe, this just in: “More than 20,000 people have been killed on Mumbai’s notoriously overcrowded train system over the past five years — many of them crushed, run over or electrocuted — according to official data.”
“No other city in India has so many people traveling by one mode of transport. There are a minimum of 10 deaths daily on the railways,” A.K. Sharma, the railway commissioner, was quoted as saying.
Stayed tuned for a post from our Mumbai-based transport engineer Madhav Pai on ‘Super Dense Crush Load.
Photo By EMBARQ-WRI.
For the second year in a row, Mexico City has shown that being green can pay. Last week the city was awarded 200,000 Euros from the Spanish Carbon Fund for reducing carbon emissions as part of MetroBus, a bus rapid transit system that has reduced the number of polluting cars on the road.
Metrobús was Launched on June 19, 2005, and carries an average of 260,000 passengers a day. After more than two years in operation, it has carried more than 200 million passengers.
Photos from Ads of the World.
The rule of thumb when designing a billboard is minimalism: keep it short and simple so that your message is absorbed by anyone, even people casting the most fleeting glance. So why does this billboard in Mumbai have so much text? Traffic. The traffic moves so slowly here that the industry standard doesn’t apply.
Here’s a close up shot so you can read the text of the billboard:
As these billboards suggest, the police are starting to take congestion and the resulting air pollution seriously. This makes sense since its the traffic police that have to stand in traffic all day and breath in exhaust. In Calcutta, many police stations are already being outfitted with oxygen devices so that police officers can breath easier after having been on the streets all day. Read the rest of this entry »
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