India is very keen about building modern metro rapid transit systems for its cities (three already have one, twelve more are planning to), but very few of those cities are thinking about planning convenient pedestrian access to their stations. As sound as the intent is to make urban commuters shun cars for fast and comfortable public transport, walking to metro stations from home or office is an extremely unpleasant experience.
The pedestrian infrastructure is particularly worrisome in Mumbai, India’s most congested and land-crunched metropolis, where footpaths have continuously shrunk (sometimes disappeared) to give way to roads under pressure from an 18 million plus (and increasing) motor vehicle strength. Mumbai Metro, whose first line opens to the public this year, has its elevated stations perched atop cramped land footprints without any scope of support-infrastructure such as parking lots (not even for bicycles) in the periphery. The station staircases descend to narrow footpaths whose widths are often a fourth of those in New Delhi, the only Indian city with a successful metro. Traffic intersections closer to the stations do not have indicators for those crossing on foot.
The ownership structure of some of these metros is partly to blame. Mumbai’s metro project is co-owned by a private company (Reliance Infra) and the city’s urban development authority (MMRDA). Had the city’s municipality (BMC) also co-owned it, the metro would have had better control over its immediate surroundings. In New Delhi, where the local government co-owns the metro, the walking infrastructure to metro stations has been proactively built.
But then, India has never really cared about pedestrian rights. If the ‘right to walk’ had been a mandatory constraint on those who planned our cities’ futures, maybe our boroughs would have looked and felt differently. The need for such a right has been argued for before, but in a country where the summer heat wave is so harsh that it causes deaths, it has always been hard to think of your two feet as a pleasant mode of transport in the same way one associates walking with, say, Amsterdam, which can afford to have large car-free zones where people actually enjoy the cool June breeze.
Unless walking leads people to a metro station, which now it will in as many as fifteen Indian cities. Indians now have a reason to walk those ten minutes in the sun everyday, because at the end of the trek lies a cheaper, faster and air-conditioned ride to work. The time is ripe for India to implement pedestrians’ rights (and duties, complete with incentives against jaywalking) so that our urban planners are forced to think of wider footpaths, safe and abundant road-crossing mechanisms, buffer areas for walkers to rest at, etc. each time they go to the drawing board. It is only when commutes become a wholly high-quality experience that the metro systems will truly integrate into a city and wean car-owners off the road.