Walking on the roads in any Indian city is an unpleasant business. Dodging traffic, sidestepping puddles of water, ducking under sign boards, navigating around heaps of construction material always conveniently dumped on footpaths - a pedestrian is faced with an unending series of obstacles. Most of these are because of the sheer apathy towards a walker by the public authorities, somehow you're just not important enough to be provided a nice walkable pathway.
The “walkmobile” was invented by Hermann Knoflacher, Professor at the Institute of Transportation at Vienna University of Technology. It is a simple frame made of wood and has the size of a car. A belt makes it easy to walk around with this frame. The idea of the “walkmobile” is to show how much space a car needs and how much city space we are willing to cut from public space and give it away to the group of car drivers. This results in streets where the whole width is reserved for cars and motorbikes, leaving almost no space to pedestrians - as seen on many streets in Pune. If all the pedestrians would walk around with a “walkmobile” occupying the same space as a car, our footpaths will be very fast as congested as streets are today.
Dr. Adhiraj Joglekar conducted an online survey to collect views and experiences of users with regards to the JM-FC one way scheme. The results of the first 136 respondents of the survey between 12th and 15th September 09 are summarized below. We thank Dr. Joglekar for granting us permission to use data from his survey and publish the results on our website.
It is apparent from this survey that though the scheme has increased speeds of travel, it has compromised safety of both vehicle travellers and pedestrians and cyclists, while increasing commuting distances and making it inconvenient to bus users.
The Pune chapter of Net Impact, an international nonprofit organization working to create a more socially and environmentally sustainable world, recently finished an exhaustive survey of the traffic conditions at Hinjewadi, the large software technology park close to Pune. Parisar was also a partner in the survey and provided inputs into the survey design and analysis of the findings.
