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The Way Pedestrians Are Treated In England And In India

By Vidyadhar Date

05 March, 2013
Countercurrents.org

Mr Terence Bendixson , 78, is perhaps the most senior among campaigners of pedestrian rights in England. It is because of dedicated people like him that England is more walker friendly than several other countries. He continues to ride on his bicycle regularly in London at this age and he walks a lot. He insisted on walking up the stairs in the Yacht Club in Mumbai during his recent visit when I met him and refused to take the lift.

Mr Bendixson is the president of Living Streets, a leading organization for livable, pedestrian-friendly, sociable streets and is in the movement for pedestrian rights for decades. He has written books including Instead of Cars, a book that suggests alternatives to automobile dominance. Currently he is working on a book in Shanghai. The Chinese are very well organized and while there are challenges for pedestrians there the authorities do a decent job of providing basic services.

Living Streets gets a lot of funding from the government department of health as there is greater recognition of the health benefits from walking and it campaigns for and organizes Walk to School programmes in which children walk to school with safety. In May it is planning a Walk to Work programme in which employees could compete in walking with colleagues and in the process they also burn calories and discover new things on way to work and home.

Its chief executive Tony Armonstrong earlier worked for the health department and overlooked the programme aimed at reducing obesity. Tony and former CEO Ben Plowden have helped Living Streets make big strides in the last few years, Mr Bendixson says. England is not a paradise for pedestrians but it is quite friendly to them.
One reason London’s traffic is manageable and pedestrian friendly is that we have not built more roads, not catered to extra demands of motor cars, he says. The congestion charge on motor cars in the central part of London has worked well. But the Americans in London are a disgrace. They refuse to pay the charge, saying it is a kind of tax.

The motor car lobby is not so powerful in Britain. But elsewhere in Europe car companies do seek to dictate policies. Porsche, the auto company, has come in for criticism for trying to influence the policy on noise reduction and argued for higher levels because it wants to promote its noisy and fast cars. Bernie Ecclestone, for many years the chief of Formula 1 racing, has his own contribution to noise or his family has. His daughter has a very expensive house in a posh area in London. The beautiful garden there is dug up and neighbours have complained of horrendous noise even at night. All this for constructing three floors underground to provide for a swimming pool, gym, sauna and similar amenities.

After meeting Mr Bendixson one feels that India has major lessons from the pedestrian movement in England and other countries. The main task in India is to educate the political class and the bureaucracy which often have been extremely callous and hostile. Nothing shows the callousness more than the recent declaration by a municipal official that he wants to cut the width of footpaths to keep hawkers away. For a change, the new chief of MMRDA (Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority), Mr U.P.S. Madan, promises to make Mumbai pedestrian friendly but in the same breath he also seems to support skywalks. Skywalks are all right in some areas but the essential task is to provide proper facilities at the ground level for pedestrians. Mr Madan would also do well to do something to see that the BEST bus stops in Mumbai cease to be torture chambers for commuters. He knows this problem since one of his previous assignmens. Our people are docile, non-complaining but it does not mean they are not suffering. The torture for commuters can be easily eliminated by removing the steel bars behind the seats which make sitting there such a pain in the neck and back. The authorities are expected to provide basic amenities to people not to torture them.

The whole administrative is clearly geared to cater to the rich and ignore common people, if not intimidate and harass some of them. So while motorists can drive straight to the departure wing of the Mumbai airport, auto rickshaws are now being stopped far away , forcing people to walk with heavy luggage in the absence of trolleys. Nothing shows the truly anti-people nature of the machinery than the imposing multi storey car parking lot at the international airport and the miserable little space allotted to a bus stop without any protection against rain and heat. Even fascist states would appear to be more responsive to the needs of people. The atrocious excuse given for barring auto rickshaws is that they clog the road. That is the whole problem, ordinary people are seen as a nuisance and a problem, they are not seen as citizens who need to be given services. Cars far outnumber auto rickshaws, they occupy much more space ,they clog the streets as is so glaringly obvious and yet rickshaws are blamed.

Municipal commissioner Sitaram Kunte recently did well to conduct a course in ethics for municipal officers at the Moral Rearmament centre in Pachgani. A crash course is needed for officers in all government and even private organizations to recognize that ordinary people have their place and cannot be wished away. But then the whole idea is basically to drive away common people from the metropolis to make way for the rich. Market forces are already doing that and government policies are not very helpful. I just came to know that a poor banana seller with just a small basket sitting on the roadside was picked up by the police and made to part with some Rs 2500 or so. Such hawkers are extremely useful members of the society and at least the small ones are no nuisance at all. All the actions of the authorities against auto-rickshaws, pedestrians and hawkers fly squarely in the face of the national transport policy and the policy on street vendors.

Vidyadhar Date is a senior journalist and author of the book Traffic in the era of climate change. Datebandra@yahoo

 

 




 

 


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