Over 60% of Mumbaikars walk to their destinations, and another 20% access a railway station or a bus-stop by foot. We urgently need to move to a more humane approach to urban design. Here are three easy people-first projects we can implement right away. All require small to medium budgets but can achieve big changes.
By the numbers
Asphyxiation is the primary cause of death in crowd crushes. Station masters should be trained in crowd management to make effective decisions when crowding exceeds certain levels. But how does one know when those levels are reached?
The railways already have ticket data for where passengers board and alight. Augment that with information on the staircases and directions passengers choose; this can be obtained via several products that provide CCTV analytics and crowd-counting solutions with an accuracy of 95-99%. Staff can implement temporary solutions — ropes, plastic barriers — to increase capacity in peak directions.
Once a ‘normal’ is available from data analysis, whenever capacity or predicted queues reach unacceptable levels, alerts can be sent which can trigger announcements and the deployment of staff to manage the crowds. In extreme situations, trains can be stopped before reaching affected stations until the situation is under control.
The high way
Crossing east-west in central Mumbai by vehicle can take a really long time. Creating new east-west roads in that congested part of the city would be difficult. But we are a city that walks, and it is really a walkable distance: Worli Sea Face to the eastern waterfront is 4-6 km. It is completely possible to create paths only for walking in that space. These pedestrian boulevards could be elevated roads that connect waterfronts, commercial buildings, railway stations, hospitals and other institutional buildings. (A lot of street public parking has been created in the area due to TDR rules; these can also be connected.) Costs will vary between ₹2 crore and ₹10 crore a kilometre, depending on the quality of the urban design; the goal must be to provide high quality public spaces for people to walk and to feel respected. WRI India has done a feasibility study, and has identified three possible routes in central Mumbai including some sections through gardens and other open spaces.
Calming design
At most traffic junctions, while pedestrians are the majority the design is vehicles-first and does not ‘communicate’ with pedestrians; that’s why we see them run helter-skelter. Continuous lanes can improve traffic flow, and traffic-calming treatments — refuge islands, bollards, bulbouts, raised crossings — can reduce conflict points, provide wayfinding for pedestrians, and create safe spaces while crossing. And they can be done with low-cost materials like plastic barriers and ropes to begin with.
Our own retrofitting experiments using simple barriers and markings (at the intersection of Linking road and S.V. Road in Bandra, Mith Chowki in Malad, and Nagpada in South Mumbai) has shown that it is easy to introduce principles of way-finding and channel pedestrian movements. The traffic police saw improvements in traffic flow and pedestrians immediately took to demarcated spaces created for them.
Madhav Pai is Director, Sustainable Cities, WRI India Ross Centre
