Some months ago, I was led to believe that the Corporation of Chennai was being sensible and open-minded to the dream of restoring public spaces to the people and not sacrificing them at the altar of the automobile. I had been to a consultation involving the Commissioner of Chennai Corporation and organisations like the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) and Chennai City Connect Foundaion (CCCF), where an entire day was spent by some six groups of ten people each, charting out possible streets which could accommodate bicycle lanes, and such notions unimaginable in Indian cities. Even last week, Raj Cherubal of Chennai City Connect was proudly telling me Chennai was becoming the cynosure of all eyes, with such projects as reclaiming pavements in Besant Nagar, Pantheon Road, etc., and the great plans in store for rendering large parts of Mylapore and T. Nagar `for pedestrians only'!
Imagine my shock when I learnt there was going to be a meeting between Chennai Corporation officials and residents of Mandaiveli to discuss plans for the proposed grade separators in Mandaiveli and three other places, one of which is to be at an intersection used every day by many of my friends on their way to and from work. So I sounded the alarm to our friends that some of us should go to this meeting to put across our point of view. As it turned out, only three of us had planned to meet there, and the omens on the way did not augur well. Firstly, on the way to the hall where this meeting had been announced, we had to pass SIET road, one of the roads where the pavements had allegedly been `reclaimed' and what I saw was this:
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| Bikes claiming the pavements back! |
When we got to the hall, where I had insisted on taking my wheelchair if at least to make a statement, what met me was:
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| The inevitable step, without even an apology for a ramp |
I soldiered on till the step, and `volunteered' a couple of people there to help carry the wheelchair up the inevitable single step. Although I got there only half hour after the stated starting time, it was only after I had commandeered a corner at the front of the hall that the dignitaries trooped in and the show got on the road. The presentation started with a descriptions of the four roads coming into the Mandaiveli intersection under discussion. We were provided with statistics of how many cars went from any one of those roads to any other in a specified interval of time, and how they were planning an overbridge from one of the four roads to another, and how this would make it possible for so many more cars to traverse the intersection in the same interval of time. I kept tying to raise my hand to ask what the statistics for the pedestrians were, and if it was assumed to be obvious that enabling more cars to travel faster was the only way to go forward. But of course, my hand was never acknowledged and one had to wait until a boring littany of numbers regarding the widening of roads had to be gone through, which nobody would have remembered a few minutes later, and the the floor was open for questions only after the presentation was over. Immediately, some gentleman started shooting off his questions before I could hope for a kindly soul to recognise my raised hand. Thereupon, the Mayor of Chennai Corporation came down from the dais and came down to speak to this gent, crossing me on his way, followed by a group of followers, so I had to strain to even see the Mayor's back. The gentleman who had made the presentation was next to me and I pleaded with him to give me a chance to ask a question. After a few minutes, he gave me a cordless mike so I could chirp in when there was a lull in the dialogues the Mayor was being engaged in by several people. When my chance came, I told the Mayor I had been waiting a long time to ask some questions, and he very magnanimously asked me to `pray proceed'. I said that we had only heard about cars, and I wanted to know how people like me or elderly people would get to cross the newly constructed roads whose purpose seemed to be to ensure a constant free flow of traffic; he turned to one of his flunkies and said `there are indications of that in our maps, no?'. The flunky said yes, the mike was taken away from me, and I realised there was litle point in our staying any longer and came out with a sick feeling in my stomach. Sure enough, today's newpapers covered the `event' and said that decisions had been finalised by the Corporation on the grade separators in the four places mentioned earlier.
The short-sightedness mentioned in the title refers to the comment in the presentation that when this overbridge had come up, we would have no problems of traffic congestion for the next twenty years. Would more overbridges come up after twenty years, then?
The one-track mind refers to the thinking that the only way forward is to have more and more cars traveling faster and faster? No one seems to even consider the fact that the number of road traffic accidents per year have been steadily increasing every year at a staggering rate, and with it the number of fatalities, a very high percentage of which consists of elderly pedestrians. This model of `growth' will only result in confining the aged and the people with disabilities to the four walls of their homes.
The only possible conclusion I am talking about is total stagnation - with nobody getting from anywhere to anywhere else - cos we'll soon run out of gasoline to run our cars, and we would have backed ourselves into a corner due to not having improved our public transport.
And here is something else that really gets my goat. I received email about how in order to prevent our motor-cyclists parking their vehicles in the way, the Bombay Metro has started putting up bollards all over the place, thereby enacting a case of throwing out your wheel-chair-users along with the motor-cycles! See this link if you want to get really dejected/furious. And as icing on the cake, here are some (bad) photographs I took of motorcyclists whizzing along on the pavement of Gandhi Mantapam Road:
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| Where does one walk? |
Fortunately, I will not have to live in this country forty years from now, but heaven help our children!
very annoying.
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