The sun setting in Mumbai. Photo by d ha rm e sh.

Earlier this week, TheCityFix ran the first part of an interview with Krishnaraj Rao, a citizen turned activist, who now spends a significant portion of his day advocating for pedestrian rights in Mumbai. Through a movement called Sahasi Padayatri, Mr. Rao 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. Below is the second part of the interview.

How do you see your activities fitting into the larger environmental movement?

Sahasi Padyatri is essentially focused on creating a pedestrian-friendly and citizen-friendly environment. We believe that a preponderance of public transport and a diminished role of private transport is the way for our city to attain sustainability. We believe that public space is a precious resource that must be jealously guarded.

I set out in June 2007 as an activist against the various aspects of Economic Growthism that are causing global warming today, and addressed about 25 audiences until March on this topic at colleges, schools, Rotary Clubs etc.

In December, I met Santosh Jangam, who sells books on a train for a living. This meeting and our later association in creating the Sahasi Padyatri movement brought the realization that unless we could connect the anti-global-warming agenda to the interest of the common man, we were bound to strive in vain for a change that would stubbornly refuse to happen.

To me, the effort to render our city suitable for walking and peacefully commuting by public transport is co-terminus with making my world more energy-efficient and a cleaner, better place for all creatures and all species.

How is your organization using IT – cell phones, blogs, etc. – to organize and generate support?

For several months, I have been blogging on this issue, and on other issues related to climate change, at my blogsites. (You can read them here and here.)

I have networked furiously with several individuals and organizations late in 2007 and early in 2008. My intensity on the internet has abated only since February, when I stepped out of the cyber-world into meatspace.

I email close to a hundred concerned citizens, media persons and authorities with my communiques on pedestrian issues, and network furiously using SMS, mobile phone and phone for this purpose. I am happy that newspapers like DNA are supporting our campaign and publicizing our mobile number and email address, putting hundreds of like minded citizens in touch with us. Read the rest of this entry »

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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 »

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Going nowhere fast in Bangkok. Photo by pchweat.

Which city has the world’s worst traffic? It’s a tough question, as cities like Sao Paulo, Cairo, Mumbai, and Los Angeles compete neck and neck for the world’s worst bottlenecks. But Time Magazine thinks it has found its answer in Bangkok, dubbing Thailand’s megacity “The Capital of Gridlock.” Hannah Beech, the author of the Time news story, explains just how bad traffic can get, writing that, “Police don’t consider traffic bad until a car is stationary for at least an hour. Really bad is two hours.”

Overall, Ms. Beech does a tremendous job covering the wide range of problems connected to Bangkok’s traffic congestion:

The human side: “Traffic in Thailand’s capital snarls with such ferocity that hundreds of women over the past few years have been forced to give birth in cars.” Police are now trained in midwifery, she reports.

The economic side: “More than $1 billion in productivity is lost every year to traffic jams.”

The environmental side: In the 1970’s Bangkok cemented over canals to build more streets for the growing number of cars. “…the declining number of canals, which once served as reservoirs for rain, means that substantial portions of the city flood during the five-month-long wet season. The rising water invariably short-circuits traffic lights, turning intersections into free-for-alls.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Congestion pricing is good for the environment and public health. Photo by dlisbona.

A team of scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and King’s College London conducted a study showing that London’s congestion pricing scheme has reduced air pollution in central London, saving Londoners as a whole 1888 extra years of life. The study focused on two types of pollutants from cars: NO2, a chemical compound known to cause acute and chronic bronchitis, and particulate matter (PM10), tiny particles suspended in the air which can become embedded in the lungs, causing asthma and bronchitis.

The authors of the study, which was published in the journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, are hardly sanguine about their results, noting that overall London saw only “modest” reductions in NO2 and PM10 levels. However, they also point out that, “Absolute and relative reductions in NO2 and PM10 were greatest within the congestion charging zone wards,” suggesting that an expansion of the zone would have an even greater environmental and health impact. Read the rest of this entry »

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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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Para espanol, clique aqui.

São Paulo is a city of walls erected on a foundation of fear, with it’s 11 million residents, or at least the subset that can afford to, hunkering down in gated condominiums, strolling in private parks, playing soccer on private fields, and driving private vehicles, all to keep out the storm of crime and violence that has pummeled the city. As the wealthy and middle classes retreat from public space and seek security behind walls, the urban poor have been left to fend for themselves in the neglected and decaying public space.

As is the case in many large cities, the poorest residents – those who are most dependent on mass transportation - live on the city’s periphery where jobs in the formal economy are scarce and basic infrastructure, like mass transit, plumbing, and electricity are utterly lacking. As Sociedad do Automovel so successfully shows, the public transportation system is not nearly adequate to meet the needs of these people, many of whom commute more than two hours just to get to work each day, an indignity that only increases the social exclusion of the urban poor.

With the quality of public transportation so low – and fear of assaults so high – people of means opt for private transport, like cars, which provide a veneer of protection. Yet it’s hardly clear that cars make people safer; cars are an indicator of wealth and many robberies happen to people who are locked in their cars: “lightening” kidnappings, muggings at traffic lights, and car heists.

But fear is a powerful feeling, and coupled with the desire to be part of middle and upper classes, a desired inextricably linked with car ownership, people continue to buy cars. And at an astounding rate: on average, 800 new vehicles are added to Sao Paulo’s streets every day! According to Irineu Gnecco Filho, of the 5.4 million cars circulating daily on the highways, only 3 million are traveling at the same time simply because there isn’t enough space for them all. As anyone who has visited Sao Paulo knows, the traffic congestion has become out of control. And with it, the air pollution has become lethal; the pathologist Paulo Saldiva estimates that as many as 7 and 10 people are dying daily in Sao Paulo because of air pollution. Read the rest of this entry »

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Here is a fun videoclip about a situation that you would never like to be in: after having had lots of beans for lunch you naturally need a toilet and you attempt to go home to find one by braving Istanbul’s transport system!

I like the video a lot; the melody is nice, the lyrics are fun, and it provides a human touch to Istanbul’s traffic problems! The video truly represents what it’s like taking a taxi, standing in a bus like sardines in a tin, suffocating in a tram because the air conditioning doesn’t work (I myself have the opposite problem of freezing in tram with the AC blasting), and being snared in a traffic jam. If you’ve ever experienced (im)mobility in Istanbul, or, if you’ve been stuck in a taxi with a driver sucking down cigarettes, you’ll instantly sympathize with the guy in the video!

Check out what the singer “Yo” says and his message at the end!

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