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Sidewalk chaos
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With hardly any pavements along most city roads, it's a real predicament for pedestrians. GOUTAM GHOSH analyses the scene.
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Pavement peril... diminishing sidewalk space, encroachments and bad maintenance, a nightmare for pedestrians.
CHENNAI ENCOURAGES you to drive. Or shall I say, compels you to drive?
I decided to take a long walk recently. I remembered my leg-propelled ventures in Kolkata because I hated buses and trams, and there was no metro rail then. So from my residence in Park Circus, I would walk to the Lake (Rabindra Sarovar) just off Gol Park, or to the serene Babu Ghat by the Hoogli River. And I used the pavement. Kolkata was, and still is, non-aggressive to pedestrians, though macho youth try to bully road users once in a while.
Almost all the roads in Kolkata have pavements — footpaths, they used to be called. Narrow (where the pavement dwellers have to double up in sleep) or broad (where they can not only stretch out but also rotate like an hour hand), the pavements are everywhere. Hawkers enjoy a permanent settlement on the pavements of Kolkata because of the generous width and the protection of the fundamental right to life and livelihood by the courts.
Chennai is a class apart. This city, despite its relatively well-endowed roads and seemingly orderly traffic, offers hardly any pavement. Think of the dilemma of pedestrians opposite the TVS office on Anna Salai. They cannot walk along the service lane; they have no pavements to walk on; and they realise the dangers of the high-speed traffic corridor. But they have to walk.
Despite the severed umbilical cord with Kolkata, I haven't quite outgrown my urge to use my legs for locomotion. Instances of such walks are rare now than the daily rounds I would make of Kolkata till the late 1970s but short bursts are more common. I walk regularly and aimlessly along Anna Salai, at the northern end of which is my office, The Hindu.
Walking is always tricky here. When you turn the corner near the Irani tea shop, you find the pavement cropped to a mere two feet width. The tiny leather goods shop wedged into a side of a building entrance also serves as a PCO, and there is no option but to get off the pavement. Because people wait for their turn to yell into the mouthpiece, given the noise level of autos and two-wheelers flying down the middle of the road not far away. But you can't just get off because the stretch also serves as a parking lot. In fact, on many a day, I've seen car fenders devouring several inches of the space meant for pedestrians.
Thanks to the inability of vehicle owners or their drivers, cars are never parked neatly. That provides an emergency space to leap on to. (Driving tests do not include the tough Figure-of-Eight driving in Chennai, and I wonder if it exists anywhere in India.) As you cannot use the pavement and cannot walk along the edge, you are forced on to the road. You may suddenly find a yellow mole (the front of an auto) almost nudging you out of your daydream, a cyclist who weaves an intricate magic with his wheels amid the traffic, or another pedestrian bumping into you.
Pedestrians all over the world are more polite than vehicle users. In recently-civilised parts of the world (read Mark Twain's ``A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'' for a hilarious spoof on the British nobility; the book was banned in the U.K. for many years) where politeness is flashed more frequently than plastic credit cards, much to one's discomfiture at times, one is bombarded with ``Hi! how ya doin' toda-yee?'', ``Have a great day!'', ``Take care!'', plastic smiles in response to eye contacts and ``I'm so sorry! Are you okay'' if someone bumped into you.
In Chennai, inadvertent collisions neither elicit such a response nor lead to a slugging match by the roadside. Vehicle users are less polite and even less tolerant so they shout at one another for fractional incursions into their regency of the road. And God help either if one of them bumps into the other with a vehicle!
The only place in Chennai where you'll find a decent pavement is on Rajaji Salai (Beach road), especially on the side closer to the beach. There are litter bins and railings, and designer tiles as well. But that is because the road leads to the seat of power farther up north, and helps convey the decision makers to their chambers at take-off speed.
The late evening walk that took me along Inner Ring Road to Vadapalani to Kodambakkam to Anna Nagar via the Nelson Manickam Road was along the edge of the roads, except at a few places, including the Kodambakkam bridge which is graced with a narrow corridor for pedestrians to walk in a single file if all were more disciplined. So despite the footpath, I had to seek the solace and safety of the road many a time to avoid collisions, which among other things would force me to slow down.
The walk exposed me to endless traffic violations, rash driving and to the effects of three accidents, one of them serious; the inevitable traffic knots as a result and irate road users abusing one another, much to the merriment of the blessed pedestrians and their peers who depended more on natural props to propel them forward than on the less efficient mechanical monsters which could move them faster.
I am sure you will agree that driving is a means to an end (quick transit between two spatially-separated points) and not an end in itself.
However, it seems to be an end in itself in Chennai, given the exhibition of monarchy — the territorial rights and hostility as a result of transgressions into what one believes is one's territory — by the road users here. An attitude that cannot by definition be pedestrian-friendly. If you have to walk on the road, the safest will be to face the traffic instead of exposing your back to chance.
A final word about the end: driving could at times lead to an irreversible end.
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