{"id":31931,"date":"2026-10-06T01:05:53","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T01:05:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/?p=31931"},"modified":"2026-10-06T01:05:53","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T01:05:53","slug":"how-easy-is-it-to-walk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/2026\/10\/06\/how-easy-is-it-to-walk\/","title":{"rendered":"How Easy Is It To Walk?"},"content":{"rendered":"

You need no fuel, no parking space, no ticket, no charging point and, thankfully, no app. You simply put one foot in front of the other and go.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You need no fuel, no parking space, no ticket, no charging point and, thankfully, no app. You simply put one foot in front of the other and go. And yet, in many of our cities, especially Delhi, walking from one place to another can feel like an activity requiring considerable courage, patience and occasionally, the agility of an obstacle-course champion. Try walking along a Delhi road and you quickly discover that a footpath, where it exists, can have many identities.<\/p>\n

It can be a parking space, a vendor\u2019s marketplace, a construction zone, a place for utility boxes, or simply an interrupted strip that suddenly disappears altogether. At some point, the pedestrian is gently invited to step onto the road and negotiate with moving traffic. The irony is that we often speak of developing cities in terms of bigger roads, faster cars, flyovers, expressways and increasingly sophisticated transport systems. All of these are important. But perhaps there is ano ther, quieter measure of development that deserves much more attention: how easy is it for an ordinary person to walk? Delhi\u2019s own planning documents have spoken of the need for adequate pedestrian facilities, removal of encroachments from footpaths and the creation of pedestrian-friendly areas.<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s planning framework has even used the phrase \u201cpedestrian friendly city.\u201d The Delhi government has also identified safe pedestrian movement and adequate pedestrian infrastructure as explicit planning objectives. So the idea is certainly not new. Perhaps what we need now is to make the idea visible in everyday life. Look at the way many developed transport systems think about a journey. The journey does not begin when you enter a car, bus or train. It begins when you leave your front door. Those first few hundred metres matter. If you walk to a metro station, the quality of the pavement matters. The crossing matters. The traffic signal matters.<\/p>\n

The shade matters. The kerb matters. The accessibility for an elderly and the visually impaired person matters. The ability of someone with a stroller or wheelchair to cross the road matters. Once you reach the station, the connection between the pavement and the entrance matters. And when you get off the train, the journey has not ended. You still have to get from the platform to the street, and from the street to wherever you are actually going. This is increasingly how transport planning is being viewed internationally. Walking and cycling are being treated as integral parts of public transport, particularly for the first and last part of a journey.<\/p>\n

Improving pedestrian access to stations and stops matters because a wonderful metro system is of limited use if reaching it is difficult. It sounds obvious. Yet perhaps that is precisely why it is so easy to overlook. We tend to think of transport as separate boxes: roads, buses, trains, metros, airports. But the commuter does not experience transportation in boxes. She experiences one journey. And sometimes it is the smallest details that tell us whether a city has understood this. Take the simple act of stepping onto a footpath. In many parts of Delhi, the pavement is raised quite substantially above the road. To use it, one climbs up. At the next crossing, one steps down.<\/p>\n

A little further ahead, one climbs up again. Then comes a driveway, a broken kerb or an opening where the level changes once more. Walking becomes a sequence of small climbs and descents. In many European streets, the transition is far gentler. The pedestrian route flows into the crossing through a gradual gradient rather than requiring a deliberate step up and step down. The difference may appear insignificant to someone sitting inside a car, but to someone walking several kilometres or to an older person, someone carrying luggage, a parent with a stroller or a person with limited mobility, those little differences accumulate. Good pedestrian design understands that. It also understands something even more subtle: design can teach behaviour.<\/p>\n

When the pedestrian path is continuous, clearly defined and physically distinct from the carriageway, the message to everyone is remarkably clear. This is the space for people walking. That is the space for vehicles. A driver does not have to make a moral decision every few metres about whether a particular piece of pavement is meant for a motorcycle. Infrastructure has already answered the question. This matters because we sometimes assume that road discipline is entirely a matter of enforcement. Of course rules and enforcement matter. But design matters too. If a footpath is designed as a proper, continuous pedestrian corridor, with clear boundaries and appropriately designed crossings, it becomes much harder to mistake it for an extension of the road.<\/p>\n

If it is broken, interrupted and easily accessible to vehicles, the distinction becomes blurred. In that sense, good infrastructure does something rather clever. It reduces the number of decisions that people have to make. The pedestrian knows where to walk. The driver knows where to drive. The cyclist knows where to ride. At a crossing, the physical design reinforces the expectation that people on foot have priority. The city, in effect, communicates without speaking. And perhaps this is one of the less visible signs of a mature transport system. It does not depend entirely on everyone making the perfect decision every second.<\/p>\n

It creates an environment in which the right behaviour becomes the easiest behaviour. That is why a footpath is much more than a strip of concrete beside a road. It is a piece of urban communication. It tells us who belongs where. It tells a child that the road is not a place to walk. It tells a driver that the pedestrian has a protected space. It tells an elderly person that the city has thought about the effort required to move through it. And, perhaps most importantly, it tells the person walking that they have not been forgotten simply because they arrived without a vehicle.<\/p>\n

There is something else worth noticing when we look at cities that have invested heavily in transportation. The journey does not stop being important simply because the passenger has left the train. Even something as seemingly insignificant as the relationship between a train and its platform becomes part of the design question. A small gap may appear insignificant when viewed as one detail in a vast railway network. To an elderly passenger, a child, someone carrying luggage or a person with limited mobility, however, that gap can become the most important part of the journey.<\/p>\n

Good design notices such things. And that is perhaps the larger lesson we can learn from countries that have invested heavily in transportation: development does not necessarily mean making everything bigger. Sometimes it means making the smallest details work better. Perhaps we could begin thinking similarly in our own cities. Not every journey needs to be made easier by adding another lane for vehicles. Sometimes it needs a proper footpath. Not every traffic problem needs another flyover. Sometimes it needs a safe crossing and patience. Not every public transport problem needs a new mode of transport. Sometimes the existing station simply needs to be easier to reach.<\/p>\n

And not every pedestrian needs to be hurried across the road. Sometimes the road needs to slow down enough to accommodate the pedestrian. There is also something deeply democratic about a good footpath. A schoolchild can use it. So can a domestic worker, an executive, a shopkeeper, an elderly couple, a delivery worker, a tourist or someone simply going to buy milk. It belongs to everyone. Because it belongs to everyone, the quality of pedestrian infrastructure is also a quiet statement about what a city values. Do we value only movement that comes with an engine? Or do we value the person behind the movement? There is another reason to take walking seriously.<\/p>\n

It is not merely a transport choice. It affects public health, the environment, accessibility and the character of a neighbourhood. Walking is universal, relatively inexpensive and environmentally friendly, yet is often neglected precisely because it is so ordinary. Perhaps that is our biggest mistake. We overlook what is ordinary. We celebrate the metro line but forget the pavement leading to it. We admire the expressway but overlook the person trying to cross beneath it. We announce another major transport project but rarely celebrate a beautifully continuous stretch of pavement. Yet for millions of people, the humble footpath may be the most frequently used piece of transport infrastructure they encounter every day. This is not an argument against cars, roads, flyovers or modern transportation. Quite the opposite.<\/p>\n

A sophisticated city should be able to accommodate all of them. The question is whether we can design them as parts of one coherent system. Perhaps the next stage of urban development should therefore be measured not only by how quickly a city can move vehicles, but by how comfortably it can move people. Can a grandmother walk to the market without negotiating with traffic? Can a child walk safely to school? Can a person step off a metro and reach the next street without encountering a maze of parked vehicles and broken pavements?<\/p>\n

Can someone using a wheelchair travel a meaningful distance without needing an escort to navigate the city? Can two people walk together and actually enjoy the walk? These are not extravagant demands. They are remarkably modest ones. And perhaps that is why they deserve our attention. And before we build the next bigger road, perhaps we should pause for a moment and ask a very small question: Where will the person on foot walk?<\/p>\n

The writer is a certified yoga teacher, and heads marketing in a multinational company. Courtesy: The Statesman<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You need no fuel, no parking space, no ticket, no charging point and, thankfully, no app. You simply put one foot in front of the other and go. You need no fuel, no parking space, no ticket, no charging point and, thankfully, no app. You simply put one foot in front of the other and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31932,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31933,"href":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31931\/revisions\/31933"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kashmirthunder.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}