Pavements & Pedestrians: Post Mortem or Prevention?

The reality of modern urban India, there is a pavement here, barely. It's a far cry from the squeaky clean image portrayed in B-Town blockbusters and daily serials.

Don't get me wrong, before we go any further I just want to point out that I love India, I love living in India, and I've chosen to live here rather than in my native Europe. Still there are some things here that really get my goat, so to speak!

One of the seemingly more minor gripes I have had for a long time, is the quality of the pavements here in India. I say seemingly minor as I recently came across some statistics that made me think, that shocked me, and helped me connect some dots logically. I still have an issue with the pavements here, but I no longer regard it as a minor irritation. It's actually far more serious than that.

I currently live in one of the large metro cities in the south of the country, but previously lived for years in another metro on the eastern side of India. The photos utilised in this article are drawn from my own private collection, with the vast majority taken over the last few days around my own locality.

So when I say I have a problem with the pavements here, what actually am I moaning about? Well let me illustrate.........

Where's the pavement gone?

Living in an ultra urban and largely residential suburb of a large metro you'd expect to find a pavement on most of the roads in the district right?

Well..........

Scene outside of my local ATM

The metro I live in has commissioned work to upgrade the drainage system in my locality. The work started before the monsoon, then dragged on during and even beyond, the rainy season.

In many cases old drainage channels under pavements were excavated and then left open for days, or even weeks in some instances....

Even after completion, the pavements or roadside areas were often not put back together in any semblance of their previous state.

No attempt was made to cordon off the giant hole where the pavement once was, imagine if a young one or someone elderly fell in?

I saw the hole before rain flooded it, it's a lot deeper then you might think....

Corner at a busy junction next to a major hospital.

This type of public work, at least, has some upside in that it should improve the local infrastructure, preventing roads from flooding and keeping the local traffic moving more easily. Too much planning though seems to concentrate on the needs of motorists and neglects to consider the impacts on pedestrians, particularly when projects overrun as they have a way of doing most of the time.

The picture opposite is particularly galling, the deposited pipes are no doubt going to be carrying drain water safely away sometime in the near future, right now all they are doing is forcing pedestrians into the middle of the road at a busy crossroads (more on that further below).

Worse yet is when the pavement is eaten up by some private construction project as in the next pictures below.

it's impossible to use this pavement, opposite a famous eatery, due to the ongoing construction of a new commercial building.

More of the same here, in this instance the workers have even gone to the trouble of building a temporary wall to help stockpile gravel for the construction. The rest of the pavement is lost anyway under more material.

Random pile of branches, tree trunks, and Lord only knows what else. Oh and a pavement. Somewhere.

Even if a pavement hasn't been lost to some form of construction, there's a chance that there will be some other form of obstacle blocking your morning constitutional, your evening stroll, or your panicked run to the office after you remembered today was the day the boss wanted that report on his desk first thing...oh god why can't you remember important things like this?! Sorry had a flashback or something there. Anyway here some are a couple more examples of obstacles to fume over.

Hire cycles blocking the only pathway leading into a busy junction. This walkway is often blocked with parked two-wheelers forcing pedestrians into the busy, and narrow, road.

Well......not what you'd ordinarily use a pavement for.

Hawkers and their pop up shops are another regular pavement blight.

So what? I hear you say......

What does it matter if there's no pavement? Well it matters because it pushes pedestrians into the road as illustrated below:

A perpetually busy road near my residence, as usual pedestrians are forced into the busy stream of oncoming traffic by numerous obstructions on the pavement.

Just around the corner and it's the same story....

Remember those pipes from earlier? By the hospital? This gentleman had to step into the middle of the road because of the same. Something tells me dodging an oncoming car with all that on your head wouldn't be easy....

Not convinced? Here's a wider shot. You can't tell from this, but it's actually a very, very busy junction.

So what if we have to walk in the road? This is India, we're used to it!

Well that brings me right back to those frightening statistics I mentioned at the top of the article. So what statistics are those then? Statistics for pedestrian road deaths in India as it happens.

Unless you pay no attention to news whatsoever, or arrived from Krypton just yesterday, you'd probably be aware that India has one of the worst records in the World for traffic fatalities. Less well known is that the pedestrian fatality record for India is equally bad......and it's getting worse.

2017 data released by the Indian government late in 2018 [i], shows a shocking rise over the preceding three years, from 12,330 annually in 2014 to 20,457 in 2017. That's a cumulative annual growth rate of 18.65% which is shocking in itself, however most shocking is the rise between 2016 and 2017 which saw a whopping 29.92% increase in fatalities. The underlying trend has been for an ever accelerating increase year on year.

Even if you adjust for the size of the country (after all circa 20,000 deaths in a population approaching 1 billion doesn't seem so bad, does it?), comparison's with other major countries isn't flattering. World Health Organisation data (admittedly from way back in 2012) shows a rate of death per 100,000 inhabitants of 17 for India, compared to just 5 for the United Kingdom for example [ii].

As at the time of writing the 2018 data has yet to be published, but it would be a major surprise to the author of this article if there was anything other than another increase.

A study into the causes of pedestrian incidents utilising the 2016 version of the government data [iii], found that 50% of road accidents involving pedestrians occurred whilst the pedestrian was walking straight along the road, or whilst crossing the road in a straight line. That is to say then that half of the pedestrian road accidents occurred whilst the pedestrians were exhibiting normal behaviour, just walking normally along, or crossing the road in a standard manner.

Proper pavements would surely reduce the number of incidents involving pedestrians walking down the road, so please lets all bear this in mind in daily life.

On the subject of incidents whilst crossing the road, a major cause has got to be the general lack of, and otherwise poor quality of, pedestrian crossing points on Indian roads. To illustrate please take a look at the following images I took recently:

This is a road I've featured previously in the article, its very long and very busy, but there are no pedestrian crossing points whatsoever. None. The lass perched precariously on the central divider is probably on her way to a popular bar just across the road, she'll likely need a drink after that crossing.

Same road, same day, just a little further along. Pedestrians have no choice but to risk life and limb when crossing. Hey!! Is that guy on the bike riding without a helmet? Whilst on the phone? Naughty....

Even on the rare occasion you can find a pedestrian crossing, its usually not very good.

Right then several issues here: there's a massive obstruction half way across, there's no pedestrian control, there's no working timer to show how long before the lights change, and to top it off there's vehicles blocking the crossing.

And at the end of the crossing, a massive hole and missing pavement, enough to discourage you from using it in the first place. Great job.

Good god man, haven't you finished preaching yet!?

Not quite actually, there's some further consideration I want to mention.

First off accessibility. As in Indian pavements aren't accessible for the differently abled, or the elderly, or young children, or even most people if its dark. See what I mean below.

Even when there is an unencumbered pavement or pathway, it's often in poor condition, and quite probably poor planned. Imagine trying to tackle this section if you were elderly or a wheelchair user.

Or how about using this patch of pavement in the dark? Could be an expensive trip to the doctor or dentist if you don't notice the protruding grill or manhole cover...

Please just shut up now!

OK, OK, fine. Just let me wrap it up though, by taking us back to the subtitle of the piece: Post Mortem or Prevention?

Post Mortem should be fairly self explanatory, and I think ideally everybody would like to decrease the number of unnecessary autopsies for pedestrian road traffic victims.

How to achieve that? Well prevention obviously. To this observer a fairly obvious way to help prevent pedestrian deaths would be to improve the quality of pavements (you might have expected that considering how I've been banging on about the negative aspects throughout this article), and to improve access to said pavements. Both of these things would mean less pedestrians in the road and therefore less chance of accidents involving those same pedestrians.

Furthermore the whole approach to pedestrians in India needs to alter in my opinion. Take for example the lack of adequate pedestrian crossings, which makes crossing the road a dangerous and stressful experience. It makes you feel that pedestrians are third class citizens in Incredible India. The needs of pedestrians appear to be the last thing that planners, builders, and other road users have in mind, and I think the only way to change that is to actually raise the issue and tackle what appears to be in-built ignorance in regard to the subject.

Finally, prevention doesn't just reduce pedestrian accidents, it has a further reach. Currently many people are put off walking even short journeys and instead will reach for their phone to book an Uber, or hail an auto, or hop in the car because of the difficulty in traversing local pavements. Just think for a minute about how those extra vehicular journeys affect our lives - the extra congestion on the roads, the additional car accidents, the extra pollution caused by all those engines (I note today the extent of the smog in Delhi has been major news in both the Indian and International media for example).

By improving the lot of the Indian pedestrian, the nation as a whole can reap great benefits.

Lastly a shot from my home town in Europe to show you that if a sensible road and pavement structure can be managed even in a little seaside backwater, then surely it can be managed in Indian metro cities.

The street is pedestrianised meaning that it is closed to traffic for the majority of the day. When it is open to traffic though, you can see the road area is clearly defined, as are the pavements - which are flush with the road for accessibility.

[i] - Times of India article 01/10/2018 - "Killer Indian roads claim lives of 56 pedestrians daily" https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/killer-indian-roads-claim-lives-of-56-pedestrians-daily/articleshow/66021092.cms [ii] - Wikipedia entry - "Traffic accidents in India" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_accidents_in_India

[iii] - Kumaresh, G., Joerg, M., and Lich, T., "Comprehensive Study on Crashes with Pedestrians on Indian Roads," SAE Technical Paper 2019-26-0004, 2019, https://doi.org/10.4271/2019-26-0004.