Bangalore city corporation has just prepared a budget today which proposes to have a no of subways for pedestrians The issue becomes who gets priority human or car? We are soon getting converted to a car city which will somehow not be for pedestrians, cyclist or other NMT Vinay <div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 11:37 PM, Madhav Badami, Prof. <<a href="mailto:madhav.g.badami@mcgill.ca">madhav.g.badami@mcgill.ca</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Dear Vinay, Thanks very much for your posting. It certainly is important to ensure easy and safe pedestrian access to BRT and public transit. And indeed, there might be certain situations in which a pedestrian over-bridge or under-pass may be called for. However, I fear a trend toward over-bridges and under-passes or subways as the means to provide pedestrian access in Indian cities. What we need is not a few pedestrian over-bridges or subways, at such phenomenal expense, but for pedestrians (and cyclists) to be able to cross roads conveniently and safely, at grade, at tens of thousands of places, and to make it possible for them to do so at low cost. This is precisely how this end is achieved in Montreal, where I happen to live, by means of the simple expedient of the zebra crossing and the traffic light. I am in fact having a hard time trying to recall where the pedestrian over-bridges are in this city (there are no more than a handful). Apart from the unattractiveness and very limited utility -- from the point of view of pedestrians -- of a small number of pedestrian over-bridges or subways (which is what you would get with the meagre budgets allocated for "pedestrianization"), there is a more fundamental issue -- underlying the notion of pedestrian over-bridges and subways is the assumption that automobile traffic is primary (and something which pedestrians should not disrupt). What we need most of all is to begin to think of feet (the standard fitment with which all of us come into the world) as the most important travel mode, and walking as the fundamental basis of urban transport (or more precisely, accessibility) policy, and not merely as a "feeder" service for BRT or whatever, or even as merely "non-motorized" transport; and finally, to stop being spellbound by needlessly fancy and expensive technological means to achieve simple ends. Cheers, Madhav ************************************************************************ "As for the future, your task is not to foresee, but to enable it." Antoine de Saint-Exupery Madhav G. Badami, PhD School of Urban Planning and McGill School of Environment Associate Director of Graduate Affairs, McGill School of Environment McGill University Macdonald-Harrington Building 815 Sherbrooke Street West Montreal, QC, H3A 2K6, Canada Phone: 514-398-3183 Fax: 514-398-8376; 514-398-1643 URLs: <a href="http://www.mcgill.ca/urbanplanning" target="_blank">www.mcgill.ca/urbanplanning</a> <a href="http://www.mcgill.ca/mse%0Ae-mail" target="_blank">www.mcgill.ca/mse e-mail</a>: <a href="mailto:madhav.badami@mcgill.ca">madhav.badami@mcgill.ca</a> <div><div></div><div class="Wj3C7c"> </div></div></blockquote></div>