Reclaiming the streets, reinventing a capital
After experimenting with carfree initiatives sporadically, Delhi took yet another step to reclaim the street space for its people last Sunday.
For a little over three hours on the morning of November 24, residents of Greater Kailash-1, an upscale neighbourhood in south Delhi, removed vehicles on a stretch where children and adults cycled, played badminton and table tennis, performed yoga and Zumba.
“We worked out alternative routes for traffic, which was only a short detour. The public works department (PWD) made minor repairs on footpaths to make them walkable,” said local MLA Saurabh Bharadwaj, adding that he used a portion of the funds provided to legislators by the Delhi government to conduct cultural programmes in their constituencies, and is now getting requests from other neighbourhoods to help them organise similar events.
This was not the first time that Delhi has attempted to go car-free. This year, parts of Karol Bagh and Lajpat Nagar markets were made vehiclefree permanently and the model is being tried out in some others too. The civil work to complete the pedestrianisation of the entire stretch of Chandni Chowk is also underway. However, the oncea-month car-free days launched by the Delhi government in 2015 in certain locations could not be sustained because of the lack of public transportation options.
The Raahgiri Day, launched in 2013 to reclaim road space for pedestrians and cyclists, and promote physical activities, was organised in Connaught Place, Dwarka, Rohini and Shahdara, but it failed to become a regular feature in Delhi. In neighbouring Gurugram, however, the programme completed six years on Sunday. “It has been adopted by the Haryana government as a road safety and public health initiative, and held twice a month,” said Sarika Panda Bhatt, the co-founder of the project.
Bhatt is hoping that the Raahgiri at Greater Kailash will put the car-free agenda back on track. For more tangible results, she suggested that residents and local representatives identify stretches that can be turned into ‘complete streets’. “Public funds can be used to fix pavements, build cycle tracks, and create vending zones and sitting space. Every neighbourhood could have one such community space, to begin with,” she said.
Across the world, city administrators have used public initiatives like these to promote big civic ideas. “All of a sudden people see that the streets are public places and belong to all of us and things start clicking into other possibilities,” former parks commissioner of Bogota Gil Penalosa, who popularised Ciclovía — one the most successful of car-free projects in the world — told Janette Sadik-khan, the former transportation commissioner of New York City.
In her book, ‘Street Fight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution’, Sadik-khan called Bogota’s Ciclovía (Spanish for cycleways) the “most enduring example of how easily the city changed its streets”. From 7 am to 2 pm every Sunday and holidays, the Bogota administration just let city residents take to the streets “on foot, on bikes and roller skates,” she wrote.
Today, more than 1 million people participate in each
Ciclovía and “the reasons given for taking part include for health, for fun, and to protect the environment,” read an article published in The Lancet last year. Quoting studies, the authors stated that more than 40% of adult participants reported over three hours of moderate to vigorous physical activity during a Ciclovía and most participants said they would not exercise if it were not for the initiative.
Drawing inspiration from Ciclovía, Sadik-khan worked out her own version called “Summer Streets” by turning seven miles of New York streets in Manhattan into a “human-powered late-summer causeway for riding bikes, running, walking or curbside dance classes,” she wrote in her book. In August 2018, for example, nearly 300,000 people participated in events held on three consecutive Saturdays.
The Spanish city of Barcelona started freeing up as much as 60% of streets used by cars and turn them into so-called “citizen spaces” in 2016, reported the Guardian. The plan is based around the idea of superblocks or mini neighbourhoods around which traffic will flow, and in which spaces will be re-purposed to “fill our city with life,” the article stated quoting the project tagline. The initiative also aims to reduce pollution caused by vehicular emissions and noise.
If Delhi needs still more reason to reclaim some of its streets, turn to the not-soyoung who relived their childhood in GK-1 last week. Local resident welfare association member Rajiv Kakria, 60, spoke for most of them: “I grew up here when cars were few and this street was actually a playground for us. We owe this initiative to Delhi’s children.” A thought to nurture in the car-capital of India.