One-way roads have proven to be a useful method for easing traffic flow in major cities, especially in congested areas like the central business districts. The usual methodology followed is to have parallel roads beginning at common areas and ending at common areas have opposing flows of traffic. The network formed by M.G. Road, Brigade Road, Church Street, F.M. Cariappa Road and St. Mark’s Road in Bangalore can be taken as a prime example. In Calcutta, one can consider the network formed by A.J.C. Bose Road, Park Street, J.N. Road and Shakespeare Sarani as an example. In Bombay, the Nariman Point area is interspersed with arterial roads like the Madam Cama Road, Marine Drive, Jamshedji Tata Road, and all streets connecting these are one-way.

Chennai, however, has a peculiar aversion to one-way roads. Over the last decade, many attempts at creating one-way roads have failed. Three prime examples that can be considered are: (1) the network formed by Cenotaph Road, Anna Salai and Chamiers Road; (2) the network formed by T.T.K. Road, C.P. Ramaswamy Road and Chamiers Road; and, (3) the network formed by R.K. Mutt Road, Thiru Vi Ka Road, Kutchery Road and Oliver Road. Out of these experiments tried out by the Chennai Traffic Police (CTP), only the last one is still functional, resulting in considerably smoother flow of traffic and significantly lesser snarls.

Looking at the two failed cases, the first one was actually very suitable to the concept of one-way flow of traffic since Cenotaph Road, in particular, is narrow, and has had a significant road area reduced by the construction of an elevated road to connect it to Gandhi Mandapam Road at Nandanam. The CTP did introduce one-way system at this network, but backtracked within two-months due to continuous breaking of rules by the motorists using these roads.

Similarly, the one-way network formed by C.P. Ramaswamy Road, T.T.K. Road and Chamiers Road had to be discontinued due to the same reason.

In all fairness to the users of the road, both the above networks were ill conceived by the CTP: the starting and ending points were illogical. In the first case, a small stretch of Chamiers leading from Nandanam to Anna Salai was allowed to be two-way for the benefit of a small high-end residential area. In the second case, the entire stretch of the T.T.K. Road from Chamiers Road to Alwarpet was one-way, but C.P. Ramaswamy Road was one-way only from the St. Mary’s Road junction to Alwarpet.

But users too took advantage of the bad design, and stretched their breaking of rules to the extent of the roads not monitored by the CTP.

Perhaps using public hearings and with more stringent monitoring of traffic, the CTP will be able to introduce one-way traffic flows to ease traffic snarls and build-ups in many congested areas of Chennai. Obviously, one area begging for some intervention is T. Nagar.

Guest writer: Arindam Jana is a Researcher with the Small Enterprise Finance Centre housed at the Institute for Financial Management and Research.

Transparent Chennai’s research on road safety and pedestrian infrastructure has so far shed light on the increasing number of road accidents in the city, and the type of vehicular traffic (scooterists, cyclists, autorickshaws, four wheelers etc) that is affected the most during these accidents. There has been so much hype about the limited space for pedestrians, yet not much of this information has been quantified to say anything meaningful. Transparent Chennai gathered information about pedestrian infrastructure in the city, and through this post we will share some of our key findings. The information was collected from the Corporation of Chennai, the city road division of the Highway Department and the Chennai Traffic Police.

By pedestrian infrastructure we mean any infrastructure that makes walking easier on roads. These can be categorised into pavements, subways and foot-over bridges, traffic signals and traffic calmer (zebra crossing, mid block crossing, speed breakers etc).

The city has a network of almost 830 km long stretches of footpath, the width of these vary from 0.6 meters to 3.5 meters (Table 1). There are 25 subways, of which 17 are maintained by the city road division of the Highway Department and 32 foot over bridges maintained by the Corporation of Chennai.

There are 218 traffic signals of which only 39 facilitate pedestrian movement.There are 29 CCTV camera points of which 12 are localized. There are 425 zebra crossings, 185 bumpy speed breakers most of which lie in the Annanagar division as it has many schools and other institutions. These are being maintained by the Chennai Traffic police.
According to a pedestrian guideline, IRC: 103-1988, the minimum width of a pavement should be 1.5m and unobstructed. However, over 52% of the sidewalks in the city are not even 1.5m wide.

Table 1: Distribution of pavements less than 1 m Zone wise

Table 2: Distribution of pavements 1.5m wide zone wise

Table 3: Inventory of pavements (Zone wise)

Source: Analysis done based on the data provided by individual zone offices collected from all the 10 zones through RTI filed on 27th January 2011

The authorities argue that building more pavements will result in encroachment by hawkers but the analysis shows that hawkers occupy only about 3.5% of all pavements in the city of which 63% lies in zone 8 and 3. Zone 8(Kodambakkam) which is the commercial hub of the city has a little over 5% of its footpath encroached by hawkers, while Zone 3 (Pattalam) has over 15% of its footpaths occupied by hawkers. Zone 2 has about 10% of its pavements encroached by hawkers. North Madras (Zone 1,2 and 3) is the most dense part of the city and has less than 13% of the total pavements of the city which accommodates 29% of the vending stretches in the city.

This analysis is based on the data records available with the zonal offices. Please see the Our Data section of the road safety research for raw data.

Roshan Toshniwal

The Chennai City Traffic Police has started an interesting new initiative. A Facebook page that the CCTP started last year has once again become active under the initiative of the motivated new Deputy Commissioner of Traffic Sanjay Arora. Every day, the CCTP updates their status multiple times, indicating where traffic is moving slowly, where buses have broken down, and answering people’s queries about arcane traffic rules. The page, like the Delhi Traffic Police page, also fines vehicles that are in violation of the rules based on photographs sent in by users.

On the whole, most people are big fans of the CCTP’s initiative, and are commending them for improving the information flow and for taking prompt action on citizen complaints about problems. However, the page also sees a fair amount of abuse from users, who complain about corrupt traffic cops, and complain (quite rightly) that illegal parking takes place because there is almost no legal parking in the city.

Whoever is updating the CCTP’s Facebook page seems also to be extremely frustrated with the system. One update said

“Some people have pointed out that, why a single car breaking down necessitates alternate route. Most of our roads are carrying many times more than their capacity. In another words they are really saturated and traffic moves very slowly during peak period even without any obstruction on the road. In such conditions even a single event like, vehicle break down, maintenances activity, accident, rain, funeral processes, marriage in nearby kalyanamandapam etc. have adverse impact on traffic and the cascading effect goes up to couple of kilometers including various connecting roads. … The concept of peak hour has also got extended to peak period with non peak period shrinking at a accelerated rate.”

You can almost hear the weary police officer sighing as he writes this!

On Friday, the CCTP announced a new initiative, in which free sms’s will be sent to all those who subscribe with regular traffic alerts of the sort given out on Facebook. (For those interested in these updates, send an SMS with the text “JOIN CTP” to the number 09219592195.)

It is unclear, though, how useful these updates will be. Will people avoid using certain junctions if they are backed up? Are there enough alternate routes and detours that will enable traffic jams not to proliferate if people are given advance warning?

For Transparent Chennai, what might be more interesting is to use the data collected here on traffic jams and bus breakdowns to see whether there are patterns emerging. Are there particular areas which get backed up all the time? And can we fix those places using better planning?

Nithya V Raman

After the public meeting on June 4th, we have been in discussion with the Chennai Traffic Police, Cityconnect and a couple of civic activists who have formed a traffic and transportation forum (TTF) to provide suggestive measures to ease traffic congestion at busy junctions in the city. The Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Mr. Sanjay Arora has been open to suggestions and has promised to experiment with the working solutions we provide, on a temporary basis.

We have initiated this exercise with the Vijaynagar junction at Velachery which has been identified as a nightmare for pedestrians to cross with vehicles coming from all directions. The Vijaynagar bus stand lies at a crossroad connecting Taramani, the Velachery Bye Pass road or 100 feet road and the Velachery main road. The presence of 3 big eateries (Mc Donald, KFC and Adayar Ananda Bhavan) and offices like Sutherland attracts congestion at this junction. The MRTS station and the DAV school are also in close vicinity to this junction. There is also a multiplex cum shopping mall being built on the main road abutting a 30 feet road which may attract more traffic.

These commercial establishments do not have adequate parking (not even as per norms which is 1 car and 1 two wheeler parking space for every 50 meter sq metres within the corporation area ) which forces people to park on the main roads and bye lanes, which then spills over onto the main road, choking traffic.

Although the road is 200 feet wide, there are only 4 vehicular lanes and the limited footpaths are encroached by shops on both sides of the road. There are open drains in what was to be a service lane and the parts where it is covered is being used for parking vehicles. The road has no mid block crossing/ refuge or a pedestrian grade separator and as the median is a three feet high concrete barricade, the pedestrian risks his life to cross over to the other side.

In the recent past, parts of this road were acquired by the highway department for road widening and apart from Sutherland and some electric poles, these are the only premises that still stand in the way. Apparently there is also a proposal for constructing a flyover in a lane that is opposite Sutherland, to ease pressure from the Vijaynagar junction. Some officials claim that the Sutherland premises have a part of the OSR (Open Space Reservation) land which the company has been reluctant to hand over.

Evolving a solution
So on 29th June the TTF called concerned officials from the Corporation of Chennai (Zone 10), the Electricity Board, both traffic and law and order policemen in-charge of the area, traffic expert Prof. KP Subramanium, officer in-charge of building the flyover at the junction, retired officials, area representative of MTC, an active resident from the area and us.
The representative from the Highway department suggested formulating a traffic and transportation committee at a state or city level which will focus on the traffic congestion and create holistic solutions. The formulation of the committee requires brainstorming sessions from all concerned departments and the civic society on how to deal with the traffic bottleneck and facilitate faster movement.

The junction needs to be redesigned based on the traffic survey and also take the surrounding land-use into account . The corporation will need to work with an iron hand when giving building permissions and ensuring that parking norms are followed. The buses parked opposite the Vijaynagar bus stand will also need to park away from the junction.
Please send us your suggestions so that it can also be incorporated.

- Roshan Toshniwal

The much talked about elevated expressway from Chennai Port to Maduravoyal finally gets Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) clearance from The Ministry of Environment and Forests. For those who were unaware of this project or the recent developments, snapshots of maps from Transparent Chennai’s website might be of some help.

Following is a rough route map of the planned elevated expressway:

Further details are given below:

Right from its planning to inception stage, this large scale infrastructure project received a lot of negative criticism on account of not being pro-poor and environmentally friendly. Yet the project has so far succeeded in getting all approvals required for the smooth implementation of the project. While the CRZ clearance is subject to compliance with certain conditions, the question is are we well equipped to oversee that these conditions are not violated in due course?

Read more about this recent development in Hindu.

——

Somya Sethuraman

Whenever there are any potholes, or water stagnation or any services that disturb the functioning of the road and reduce mobility, the public tends to blame the Chennai Corporation. The Chennai Corporation is to maintain all city roads as per section 203(2) of the Chennai City Municipal Corporation Act, 1919. But is the Corporation really to be blamed? My research for Transparent Chennai indicates that it is actually not the Corporation that is in charge of all the roads in the city.

In the process of collecting data regarding the pedestrian facilities in the city I stumbled across a surprising fact: until 2006, the City road division of the Tamil Nadu Highway Department maintained seven corridors of roads. These city roads were handed over to the Highway Department in 2002 on a special request from the Tamil Nadu State Government as it was far from satisfactory and required urgent attention. This was done to provide good quality riding surface and driving comfort of the highway standards which the Chennai Municipal Corporation could not deliver, as it did not have enough money, man power and technical knowhow to work in this area. The funding to maintain these roads were being given by TUFIDCO (Tamil Nadu Urban Finance and Infrastructure Development Corporation).

Till today, the City Road Division of the Highway department continues to maintain four main roads measuring 65.9 kms in the city and 17 subways on these roads. Following are the roads:
S.No Name of the Road Length of Stretch being maintained in (Km)
1 Anna Salai (G.S.T Road) or NH45 28
2 Poonamalle High Road/ E.V.R.Salai (G.W.T Road)NH4 9.2
3 Wall Tax Road/ Erukkancheri High Road (G.N.T Road) NH5 10.7
4 Jawaharlal Nehru Road/ 100 Feet Road (Inner Ring Road) 17.5

But the bus shelters, street lights and the trees on these roads continues to be maintained by the Corporation of Chennai.
Any subsidiary functions such as laying of pipes (sewerage, water supply, telecom lines etc) which involves digging of roads and abruption of traffic due to these functions, on these roads requires prior permission of the Highway Department. Mr. Duraisamy, (Chief Engineer Planning division, City Road Division, Highway Department) said that the agencies responsible for these subsidiary functions pays the Highway Department for the road digging and relaying.

The question is who should one contact in case of any dysfunction of services which may lead to disruption of the traffic on these roads. As the services are being maintained multiple agencies like the water supply and drainage by the CMWSSB, the transformers and electricity supply by the TNEB, the telecom utility boxes by the various companies, the role of the Corporation and the Highway department is to manage and co-ordinate its repair and maintenance. They further hire contractors either through tenders or through their contacts to finish the job depending on the type and size of work.

The roads deteriorate due to wear and tear because of the traffic, and sometimes because it is not laid properly. The constant digging and relaying parts and stretches of roads creates imbalance and results in uneven surface. Hence, from all the above arguments, it is clear that the services on the roads require special attention, space and a body which manages and integrates these. This will result in better accountability and reduce wear and tear of the roads without disrupting traffic.

- Roshan Toshniwal

Roshan Toshniwal

The first week of January, Chennai had a campaign for road safety week. Traffic policemen handed over pamphlets containing information for safe driving to the motorist, ushering pedestrians to safely cross traffic junctions and educating children in schools about road safety. According to a recent article in The Hindu, the number of accidents in the city have stayed the same, but the number has sharply increased in the suburbs. If both the suburban and city fatalities are counted, the number of deaths from traffic accidents in Chennai in 2010 increases to 1,415. According to the reporter, this is the largest number of deaths in 10 years, nearly triple what it was in 2000.

We at Transparent Chennai had filed an RTI (Right to Information Act) petition to get the record of accidents and their locations in the last five years (2005-2009). From the data we have available, Jawaharlal Nehru Road (100 feet road), Anna Salai, EVR Salai (Poonamalee High Road) and the East Coast Road have the maximum number of accidents.

On the 100 feet road – Thirumangalam, Koyembedu, Vadapalani and the Kathipara junctions are the biggest hotspots for accidents. On EVR Salai, Nelson Manickan Road, the Ega theatre, and the Vaishnav College junction are the hotspots for accidents. On Anna Salai, Teynampet Signal, Nandanam signal and the Walajah Road junction are the hot spots. According to the data, from the recorded 5,182 accidents there were 1427 accidents in which pedestrians were involved which is about 27.5% . Between every three accidents one accident involves a pedestrian.

According to a report compiled by the WHO (World Health Organisation), road safety has become the tenth leading cause of death in the world, and is expected to become the fifth leading cause of death by 2030. The report states that “each year nearly 1.3 million people die as a result of a road traffic collision—more than 3,000 deaths each day—and more than half of these people are not travelling in a car. Twenty to fifty million more people sustain non-fatal injuries from a collision, and these injuries are an important cause of disability worldwide.”  ((WHO), 2009) More importantly, the report says that 90% of deaths related to traffic accidents occur in low- and middle-income countries, even though these countries have less than half of the world’s registered automobiles.

Within India, too, the data shows that accidents are concentrated in certain states. Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka together account for 38% of the country’s accidents. (Research WinG, 2008)

Chennai’s fatality rate puts it second on the list of metropolitan cities that experience the most number of road accidents, a comparison of official figures reveals. New Delhi, a much bigger city, recorded 1,978 traffic fatalities in 2010. Below is a comparative analysis of various cities based on 2008 data. The Tamil Nadu government wants to make changes to this situation – at least on paper. The road safety policy in the state aims to achieve a 20% reduction in fatalities and injuries from road accidents by 2013. (http://www.tn.gov.in/sta/) However, such reductions will require focused action from the government on traffic safety, of the sort we have not yet seen.

Accident profile of selected cities in 2008:

Source: Road Accidents in India (2008), Transport Research Wing, Ministry of Road Transport and Highway (GOI).

These numbers may not be accurate as several accidents are underreported, not analysed in a systematic way, not categorised under road traffic injuries and sometimes. Apart from this there are discrepancies in data provided by the media although three sources police transport and health sector keeps a record of the road traffic injuries.

——————————————————————————————————–
(WHO), W. H. (2009). Global Status report on Road Safety: Time for Action. Geneva, Switzerland: WHO press.
http://www.tn.gov.in/sta/. (n.d.). Retrieved January 5, 2011, from Tamil Nadu State Transport Department : http://www.tn.gov.in/policynotes/pdf/home_transport.pdf
Research WinG, M. o. (2008). Road Accident in India . New Delhi: Government of India.
Srivatsan, A. (2010, January 9). Fatal Accidents have tripled in the last ten Years. The Hindu , p. 3.

It has been a while since I last blogged. I could not find an appropriate topic to blog about. Moreover, the team has been blogging regularly about latest events and updates, so I waited till I was adequately inspired to put down my thoughts in words. Today seems to be the day. As I sit at home enjoying the long weekend, I can’t help but think about Transparent Chennai, and the team’s dream to make it a citizens-led platform. Each and every member of our team has an aspiration for this polluted and crowded yet strikingly beautiful city of Chennai. After the successful launch of our website, our aspirations and dreams look slightly more realistic and achievable. By asking our users to contribute, we have moved one step closer to our dream. There is this one thought that keeps the team going – ‘What if Transparent Chennai succeeds in its endeavor to empower its citizens?’ While that remains a question to be answered in due time, one might wonder who the real master minds are behind the project.

I would call them the men ‘behind the scenes’. Prabu Raja from the tech team, without whom our mapping project would have been impossible, says “I am very fond of mapping and work towards improving the technology for development. I want to leverage my skills to reach out to the citizens by allowing them to view data on exciting and easy-to-understand maps.” When asked about the city, Prabu tells me, “I hate traffic jams and I feel sad about slum dwellers living close to Cooum who suffer the most when Chennai gets flooded during incessant rains. Chennai in my dreams would be a city where all these issues have been taken care of.” Muthukumaran, who sits right next to Prabu, shares similar thoughts. “I really enjoy working on this project because the very idea that I can reach out to Chennai’s residents through this medium excites me,” says Muthu. “I only hope that people appreciate this project and come forward to join us in this modest effort of ours to change Chennai for the better.” Muthu is the man behind the interesting design of the website which has evolved over time  to become more user-friendly and catchy.

Meryl Mary Sebastian, our longest standing intern, leads a hapless life as she goes around from one zonal office to the other searching for mapable data. She might be the youngest member in our team but don’t you underestimate her skills to gather and organize data. “This project introduced me to ideas of how and what a city could be. I love that we are creating a space for information that will empower and encourage the citizens of Chennai to participate in the planning and shaping of their city,” says our intern. All that she aspires for is a ‘clean and green Chennai!’ Our newest member Vaishnavi Narasimhan has been on a roll ever since she joined the project. When questioned, she gives a curt reply – “I would like to see more trees and less garbage.” Vaishnavi has been traveling to each and every place in the city where one can find heaps of garbage. If you are a resident of Chennai, you would know that her task is practically endless. She also loves chatting up with groups and organizations and has been crucial in getting the project its due publicity.  We have one another Muthu working from home, who is invisible even to the team, but his work speaks for him. Whenever we have a problem of transferring data to the GIS platform, we look towards Muthu for solutions. His data cleaning work involves a lot of patience and time, and the team in its entirety was really happy to meet him during the launch of TC!

There have been 10 more interns for this project from different parts of the world who came and worked with us because they found the project interesting and exciting. All these members are invisible to the citizens we reach out to, but they are undoubtedly the real face of this project. Three cheers to all of you out there. Of course, there is something about this project that brings us all together – this project is about how we can make each and every day of our lives better. The website has massive potential which can be realized when more, and eventually all of us, come together and realize our duty to voice our opinions as informed and empowered residents of Chennai. Imagine- One day all of you MIGHT have enough walking space in Chennai, an excellent public transport which takes you to your destination in no time, a flyover which serves its very purpose, pollution free roads and parks, a clean and hygienic place to pee whenever you feel like and not having to hold it till you reach home, door to door collection of garbage and no mountains of smelly filth strewn around the streets of Chennai! Nobody but you can change this ‘MIGHT’ to ‘WILL’. We have already taken a number of steps towards getting closer to our dream and probably yours as well, but the rest is your responsibility.

Contact us immediately!

Posted by Somya Sethuraman

For me, walking is freedom, it’s liberation. Earlier, when I got tired of staring at the computer or a book, I would always go out and take a walk. A long quiet walk to refresh my mind, let the thoughts flow freely and treat my eyes to the lush green surroundings. For me, walking is also social equity, a time when people from various walks of life walk together on the same platform.

I thought that walking was one of my birthrights, that nobody had the authority to deprive me of it. But, all that was before they killed the greenery around me and reduced the width of the footpath to build a new flyover next to my house. When I asked why, they said that it was an answer to the heavy traffic problem in the area. Now, I prefer staying in the enclosed walls of my house, for my safety and to avoid the noise and pollution from the increased traffic flow in my vicinity. I am a citizen of Chennai and I am deeply disturbed by the loss of walking space within the city. How many of us share a similar story? Countless, is my guess.

Reports confirm that increasing traffic leads to increasing number of road accidents, increased noise, injuries, pollution and congestion.¹ Chennai has been no exception and has been facing similar consequences because of the increased traffic flow within the city.

A World Bank report states that in developing cities across the globe, walkers comprise over a third of the modal share of all trips made.² In Chennai as well, the same ratio applies, where, out of a 100 people, 30 make their trips by walking. Yet, development projects for the transport sector have largely focused on flyovers, bridges, connecting roads, highways, and public and private modes of transport. Footpaths and pedestrians get almost no mention in these projects, nor in city budgets. And even if they do get a mention, they are largely ignored when transport plans are executed. When we were looking for data for the Transparent Chennai map on pedestrians, the only information that we could find was on the budget allocation (zone-wise) for footpaths and works completed/in progress (just one figure). However, there is no way of verifying if the money is actually spent on such works and whether they are being spent judiciously. If the above could be verified, then we could get down to the next level of checking the quality of these footpaths. However, even a layman like me can tell you the worsening condition of the footpaths within the city.

This is pretty surprising considering that each and every one of us is a pedestrian at some point of time or the other. Why then are road transport projects not pedestrian centric? How is a flyover built without taking into consideration the loss of walking space? Norms specify that footpaths should not be less than 1.5m in residential streets and 3.0m on major roads with commercial activities. Why don’t we see these norms being implemented? The City Development Plan for Chennai Metropolitan Area confirms that capacity of almost all roads in the present system is reduced due to poor quality of riding surface, inadequate pedestrian pavement, poor lighting conditions and lack of properly designed intersections. Permanent and temporary encroachment of footpaths and carriageways has worsened the situation. If this isn’t enough to justify the need for a pedestrian friendly city, then one could also look at the increasing pollution levels within the city.

Reports state that the air pollution levels in Chennai are well above permissible limits (suspended particulate matter (SPM) ranging from 264 to 451 against the permissible limit of 200, carbon monoxide (CO) ranging from 1908 to 4198 μ-g/m3 against the permissible limit of 2000), leading to health hazards that none of the citizens can escape.

It is important for the city to amend the existing transport plans to give utmost importance to the interests of pedestrians and bicyclists which constitute the majority within the city. If majority of the commuters within the city comprise of walkers and bicyclists, then there is no reason as to why the interests of these sections of the society should go largely ignored.

Contributed by – Somya Sethuraman, a Researcher for the Transparent Chennai team of the Centre for Development Finance, IFMR

Certain things that I noticed about Chennai in the three years that I spent here are quite peculiar. First, busy roads are suddenly closed down, unannounced, for renovation or for a ‘VIP’ visit. All cities in India experience this, but in Chennai it happens too often to go unnoticed. Second, there is no clear definition of a ‘main road’. Buses, trucks and all kinds of other heavy motor vehicles seem to pass the narrowest of all roads with houses on either side. What is more shocking is to see kids playing on these roads, completely oblivious of the traffic around them. Third, this city doesn’t seem to invest in pukka roads. So one fine day when it rains, the road disappears and all that is left of it is potholes. In spite of all this, I love this city because of its beaches, its simplicity and its reasonably good public transport system.

One evening, after a tiring day at work, I decided to walk back home from Teynampet to Gandhinagar in Adyar. Starting at around 7pm, I expected to be home in an hour’s time. Teynampet to Gandhinagar should be around 6-7kms but the benefit of walking is that you can walk through one-ways, traffic jams and even blocked roads. So for all you know, walking back could in fact be faster than traveling in a motor vehicle within the city! While not much seems to be in place for the pedestrians in this city, it is made worse by the pedestrians themselves who mostly jaywalk. The end result is chaos, with sudden brakes being applied by vehicles and long leaps of narrow escapes made by pedestrians from one side of the road to the other. Since I had left office at the peak hour when most are travelling back home, I knew it was not exactly going to be a pleasant walk. The first leg of my walk was from my office to Nandanam. What really upset me during the walk were the uneven and discontinuous footpaths. Every commercial building/housing complex on my way seemed to have created their own walkway outside their premises, of different widths. Added to this, there were two wheelers parked on the footpath, which meant that I had to hop down to the main road in the middle of the traffic and then hop back to a new footpath of a different width and height. Finally, the foul smell during the walk just killed the fun. Men seem to urinate anywhere they feel like, as if all the walls and footpaths in Chennai are nothing but urinals. Obviously, the experience was far from pleasant.

But as I turned from Nandanam to Kotturpuram, I was pleasantly surprised. The area was well-lit, had a really nice park to my left, and the bridge built over Adyar river was constructed keeping in mind the pedestrians. However, expecting cycle lanes is a bit too idealistic here. I decided to walk via the Kotturpuram market which was very crowded, with traffic running in all directions. No sign of any footpath/signal on the way. And worse, street hawkers had encroached upon both the pedestrian space and even blocked half of the road. What I found even more astonishing is a temple right in the middle of the road! So devotees stand outside the temple during ‘archanai’, fully immersed, in the midst of the traffic and noise! Yet, walking from Kotturpuram to Gandhinagar was a fairly nice experience, and since the beach is closer to Adyar, the cool breeze calmed me down. It was 9pm when I reached home, thanks to the coffee break that I had taken at Nandanam CCD. Luckily, I used the washroom in CCD because all along my walk back home I could spot only one public convenience at Kotturpuram signal and that also was stinking from a distance of 200m. Only men who feel free to urinate anywhere in the city seemed to be using the public toilet. I realized I should have just walked past Kotturpuram and hit the IIT flyover to reach Gandhinagar rather than the stupid shortcut through the market. Even though the walk would have been longer, the roads are well lit and pedestrian friendly, at least till you hit the crossing at IIT flyover, a place where accidents occur on a daily basis.

When I got back home, I hurriedly went in for a shower because my eyes were burning and my feet felt extremely dirty. I made up my mind to wear walking shoes and fully covered clothes for my future walkathons.

Contributed by – Somya Sethuraman, a Researcher for the Transparent Chennai team of the Centre for Development Finance, IFMR