If vendors, cars occupy walkways in office hubs, broken stretches in residential areas discourage people on foot
Is Gurugram a pedestrian-friendly city? The question is likely to draw a straight ‘no’ from most commuters. There is hardly any space for pedestrians in major parts of the city. And even if one manages to find a few walkways in some areas, they are either uneven or occupied by street vendors and parked vehicles, forcing people on foot to walk through the middle of the roads amid moving traffic.
From MG Road, where footpaths magically disappear in the crowd of hawkers, to
Golf Course Road, where citizens’ groups are fighting a legal battle for a walkway, the city has no space for pedestrians. Even internal roads don’t have enough provisions for people who prefer walking or cycling to driving.
“My office is on Golf Course Road, right across my house. So I thought I could just walk to work. However, when I tried, I was scared to death because there is no space to walk. Crossing over to the other side of the road is practically impossible,” said an HR head with a multinational company. Eventually, she was forced to drive her car to office, hardly a kilometre from her residence. Any drive in the city would reveal that the situation is more or less the same along all arterial, sector or internal roads in Gurugram. At some place, even power transformers have eaten up footpath space.
“I have seen many residents who have encroached upon the footpaths in front of their houses, converting them into gardens or parking for personal cars,” said
Trapti Singh, a resident of
DLF 2 area, who has been facing problem finding a place for evening walks.
A majority of the residents, as well as those who come to work, in the Millennium City has personal cars or bikes and thus can conveniently avoid walking. However, lakhs of workers and labourers, who can’t afford a car, have no choice but to walk through the roads, negotiating speeding vehicles. In
Udyog Vihar, for instance, workers come in shared autos that drop them off at a junction. Then, they are forced to walk down the remaining stretches up to their manufacturing units. But in the absence of enough parking facilities in the industrial area, the footpaths are already occupied by cars. Neeraj, a cleaner who works at
Micromax office in Udyog Vihar, said, “Last week, I was walking along the footpath on my way back home. A man drove over my foot. I was lucky enough to not suffer any fracture but the pain is still there. There are too many cars in this city for anyone to spare a thought for people like us,” he said, underling the struggle of lakhs of people who walk to work every day.
To make things worse, the Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation itself levelled the footpaths on a few stretches in Udyog Vihar to make space for parking.
Sources said a large number of pedestrians met with minor or major accidents daily on city roads. Just last week, a man lost his life near Ambience mall while trying to cross the road. But, interestingly, the Gurugram police do not maintain any data on the number of pedestrians killed in road accidents.
