Urban Pedestrians

Remember a few decades ago in our cities and villages we used to travel miles without any kind of external support or vehicle's. Yes, our people walked miles n miles to reach another destination without any kind of disturbances. 

After all, time changes everything, literally everything. When a person needs to get two eggs at the end of his/her street, without any second thought they press the button, start their two-wheeler and return home. 

Now who are pedestrians, when a person walks from point A to point B with much more obstacles in platform and finally reaches the destination with some extra amount of time for a casual walk in Chennai city. 

We chennaites usually come through many problems in our daily life of walking at least one kilometer inside the city pathways. Only few areas in entire city gets an exemption from the previous sentence.

We can see many examples inside the city, when you are the walker on the red signal side of Gemini bridge your main partner's as pedestrians will be two wheelers likewise many signals in our metro city. Some platform is fully occupied with platform vendors and some are ugly enough that we can't walk anytime. Here two wheelers also play a major role in encroaching the pathways as free parking.

A subway in central railway station made me some kind of respect to the platform vendors because on the two sides of the platform they occupy only one side and one side for pedestrians, 'yeah' nice to hear right. You should remember that not only an ugly platform alone doesn't make it uncomfortable to walk on it. A zigzag unevenly aligned hollow bricks or rectangular shaped stones playing seesaw in between themselves also won't allow you to walk on it as a pedestrian. Not only platform vendors, when you walk across Perambur barracks road you can see many shop owners also encroached the pathway which force's the pedestrians to walk on the road and that's the midway where vehicle slowdown occurs in road and a point where seed for traffic increases.

Throughout the world many corporations are investing billions on Green energy, renewable energy and even some nations are spending millions on clean fusion energy for future after thirty years. Believe me, things like that won't make a big change. You can produce a huge amount of green energy but how we going to spent it, how we are going to utilize it, that matters. Think of a situation where a person needs to walk two to three kilometers to reach his/her office daily by some vehicle like auto or cab if he/she skips that situation and starts to walk daily, that's a big change for us. That daily walk by the person not only helps to save energy, which also helps the person personally himself/herself physically fit. When every obstacle for pedestrians inside the city was removed, Slowly the number of pedestrians count in the city will increase consistently. So, the main puzzle needs to be fixed here is to improve the quality of pathways in nook and cranny of our city. 

If every platform is perfect, sure a big change will happen in everyone's mind which leads to steady integration within us. Future might calm us by saying that we have new inventions and science, but only by consuming less we can bring a difference here. 

Electric bikes or by quitting fossil fuels won't help us to make a better place for us to travel. Situations like two subways was under construction in Thousand lights for years need to be rectified quickly and circumstances like that should not happen in future, it was a complete nightmare for a person to walk from Greams road to Peter's road or Avvaishamugam salai without using that subways to cross the Annasalai.

A few days before Madras High court orders that all two wheelers and Hawkers in the road side pathways of NSC Bose street in parrys need to be cleared. November 13th, 2019 (13/11/19) Wednesday our government has opened a pedestrian plaza on Pondy bazaar (Soundarapandianar Angadi) which will be a great initiative to increase the pedestrians count across the city. Remember, stick to the Basics.