It is a 900-metre stretch in Nallagandla, it is a 700-metre stretch in Masab Tank and it is a kilometre long stretch near Suchitra Junction. These are the ‘lengths’ that citizens have to go to, literally, to cross over to the other side of the road. At Nallagandla, a row of apartments is on one side and a row of big retail outlets on the other. In Masab Tank, the Sarojini Devi Eye Hospital is on one side and the parking bay for regional transport buses on the other.
These long stretches with speeding traffic are divvying up the city and making the city more pedestrian-unfriendly. “Traffic was slow here and people used to cross over to the shops on the other side. Now, the traffic speed has gone up,” says Suresh, who has seen the Nallagandla area change over the past four years with the ringside view of his coconut stall.
On Monday, a woman tumbled at the road divider as she tried to cross the road in the company of other women. A thin wire has been strung up to stop people from crossing over.
“These high-speed highway-type roads are a disaster in the making. Globally, cities are calming down traffic and giving higher priority to pedestrians. Providing well designed inclusive at-grade road crossings for pedestrians at every 200 metres is the best practice in progressive countries,” says Jasmine Singh, an urban planner.
The medians not are not just a hurdle but are walls with trees in the middle. Near the CM’s camp office, there are small olive trees over the 400-metre stretch that citizens have to walk on the road without footpath to cross to the other side without the help of a zebra crossing.
“We are working on the NH65 (near Miyapur) to create mid-block crossing and table-top crossing that slow down vehicles and allow people to cross. Pelican signals are also being installed in the western part of the city, but they should not be misused, and require police presence,” says Tarun George, a sustainable transport proponent working with World Resource Institute.
He advocates streamlining pedestrian movement matching pedestrian movement with carriageways. “Our experience is that foot over-bridges are not used by pedestrians and table-top crossing are an effective solution,” he says.
An intervention to help smoothen pedestrian movement can be seen at the Hi-Tec City Junction. Incidentally, Hyderabad has seen 113 pedestrian deaths in the past two years.
