As the cities burst at their seams with people, having more vehicles for transportation is not going to be a viable option anymore. The need of the hour is to rely more on public transport, to share resources like roads through car pooling and most importantly to use walking as a complimentary means of transport.
Mumbai may be the city of dreams but it certainly turns nightmarish when it comes to walkways for the pedestrians. A huge percentage of the daily commute use public transportation and that results in many of them walking that last mile between their stop or station and their place of work or their home. And yet time and time again, the infrastructure fails us its bi-ped citizens. While some of the blame can be accosted to the BMC, the real challenge is the intrinsic worth considered for someone who walks as a means of commute and the way we look treat public spaces in general.
Roads seem to have always belonged to vehicles, but this isn't the case. In earlier times, when vehicles were animal powered and moved a lot slower, pedestrians and vehicles coexisted in harmony. You may have had an odd moment when a galavanting person screamed past unsuspecting people walking on the road with his young stallion but by and large things moved at a steady pace. About a 120 years ago that changed with the advent of fuel powered vehicles. They still moved at snail's pace compared to today but by those days standards, they were pretty much neck and neck with the animals of those times. And they were a lot more efficient, guzzling much less fuel than their equine competitors! But more than a century later, cars have gotten a lot more efficient, powerful and dense in today's metropolis. And the pedestrian who moved pretty much at the same pace as the horses and bullocks of the era gone by became a menace, on a road that got a lot faster. Vehicles also got associated with status and monetary power which didn't help the cause of the humble pedestrian. Before you know it, not having a car on the road was the price a pedestrian paid for his failure at not having enough money rather than a convenience in ever congested city. Who would want to be the lowly pedestrian in this narrative?
This of course doesn't completely explain the squeeze we pedestrians face on the footpath. India and many other countries like it face another defiency: the ability of being able to distinguish private and public spaces. The problem is more pronounced in cities where there isn't any reasonable private space one can own and one has no choice but to spill over into the public area. You see this happen in parks, in public buildings but nowhere is this problem as acute as the roads. Try walking in a 1 square kilometre area of any local rail station in Mumbai, venture on any busy street with shops and commerce. You will find vendors selling vegetables and fashion accessories, snacks and drinks all on a way that was built for us the pedestrian. And roads that aren't blocked this way, the quieter and darker parts of town, have buses and trucks parked alongside the walkway, allowing miscreants to use this natural wall between the road and the footpath and making it a shade shadier than it already is!
The crux of this problem is this single question: as a citizen, do I own public space or does it just belong to me? Now I know these two terms own and belong mean nearly the same thing, but there is difference. When you own something you are the centre of the transaction and therefore your choices are of value. When something belongs to you, the object (or in this case the space) is at the centre of the transaction and so its needs and function is of value. It also means we to whom the object belongs, each one of us, is responsible for its upkeep and correct use. We never exercise ownership on our relationships, we influence a sense of belonging. As is with relations, so it is with public spaces and our footpaths. It belongs to all of us and hence it is our duty to protect it for the purpose it was built, for pedestrians to walk on.
I dream of a city where the humble pedestrian can once again walk on walkways with one's head held high, without drooping one's head in fear of what one might stumble into. I dream of a day when more citizens choose to take to the streets walking than in their cars. I dream of a footpath that is no longer owned by its citizens but one that belongs to its citizens and that we again become a country of pedestrians!
