The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Pedestrians feel edged out of touch-and-go traffic

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Tuesday, Jan 06, 2009
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Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Pedestrians feel edged out of touch-and-go traffic

Vidya Venkat

The deplorable state of poorly maintained pavements highlighted

“Land acquisition is a constraint in widening pavements. Pedestrians should be encouraged to patronise subways”

PHOTO: K. V. Srinivasan

Space crunch: In high pedestrian traffic zones such as Usman Road in T.Nagar, encroached pavements force pedestrians to walk on the road braving vehicles. —

CHENNAI: As part of the Road Safety Week being observed in the city, pedestrians have raised the issue of poorly-maintained pavements on roads with heavy traffic. Several stretches of Anna Salai, Purasawalkam High Road, Velachery Main Road, Sardar Patel Road and others are found to have narrow pavements, rendered unusable by obstructions such as TNEB installations, dumped debris and broken surfaces.

“Across the city one can find pavements lying unused and people walking on the roadside braving the rush of vehicles,” points out T.Venkat, a volunteer with the Walking Classes Unite, which undertakes pedestrian safety audits in the city.

Raj Cherubal of City Connect, a non-governmental organisation backed by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), that has a tie-up with the Chennai Corporation to improve pavements, agrees. He says several pavements in the city are too high or too narrow and simply lie unused which is also why they get encroached on by small shop owners.

If the city’s pavements were surveyed for its compliancewith norms laid down by the Indian Roads Congress, most of them would fail to match up, says Venkat. According to IRC guidelines, pavements should be planned in an integrated manner so as to ensure continuous pedestrian flow. The pavement width should be designed keeping the pedestrian traffic in mind. Considering the fact that places such as educational institutions, hospitals, bus stops and railway stations generate more pedestrian traffic, pavements should be wider here. It should be laid on both sides of the road and must be at least 1.5 metres long.

But in places such as the Teynampet signal or near the IIT campus, the pavement is as narrow as one-and-a-half feet. Rupa Chowdhurie, a student of Anna University, said she always found it hard to walk from university to the Kotturpuram bus stand as there was hardly any space for pedestrians on this stretch. According to Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Sunil Kumar 200 pedestrians died in accidents in 2008 which works out to 32 per cent of the 630 fatal road accidents recorded in the city last year.

Corporation Commissioner Rajesh Lakhoni said, “We are doing our best to ensure that at least existing pavements are without obstruction and in usable condition.” He said they had already launched an experiment for developing a pedestrian-friendly road on L. B. Road in Adyar and was planning to extend the facilities here to other roads as well.

Mr.Cherubal said the project was still in the planning stage. “We plan to segregate different types of traffic and make utility strips on the road so that utility infrastructure does not interfere with pedestrian traffic.”

As for the condition of pavements on Anna Salai and other arterial roads maintained by the Highways Department, Chief Engineer P.Hariraj said land acquisition was a constraint in widening pavements. He said encouraging pedestrians to patronise subways in areas such as Kalaignar arch in Saidapet could help.

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