Reclaim The Roads And Footpaths  



Our cities are growing exponentially. We are getting crowded on our streets with vehicles, hawkers and land grabbers. Day by day new vehicles are added and road side businesses are starting up. We are losing space on the road and foot paths are disappearing.

Is it the bad town planning or lawlessness? Town planning engineers have got it wrong all along and law enforcement agencies are busy taking advantage. Most of the roads have no walkable foot paths and around 30 percent of the road is left for motoring. Most of the people have to walk on the road as the foot paths are occupied by the residents to grow their garden, shop owners stocking, advertisements, small roadside businesses and hawkers. We are left with short distance of walkable foot path, after which you need to get on to the road facing the traffic as the sides are filled up by the parked vehicles. 

Roads and footpaths are free for all in our country. You can do anything you want and nobody questions you. You can raise a tent, while digging road for the poles and block the road for functions without the fear of law or basic civic sense. You can unload your building materials on the footpath and road, blocking half the road or build a temporary structure again with no regard law. It’s getting out of hand, civilians are risking lives walking on roads or uncovered footpaths over drains.

What should we be doing before our roads and footpaths disappear? I have spent more than two decades in Mysuru and will be writing in relevance to Mysuru.

Town planning in this city is of two rows of residential plots on either side of the road. Along the line of the plots will be storm water drain which is left open and sometimes closed. After the drain comes foot path and tree planted on to the roads. In between these you will have electric poles. Then you have water line running along on one side which traverses across the road for every plot. I wonder what they save by this, why they can’t run on either side of the road which doesn’t require digging an asphalted road which is expensive. There is another disadvantage with trees and electric poles. Whenever trees grow to the level of electric wires, electric board personnel will chop the tree to the side of the wires there by causing the tree to lean towards the road and grow up leaning on to the middle of the road. When trees are leaning on to the middle of the road, tall vehicles like buses and trucks cannot travel on the sides as the trees obstruct them, they drive in the middle of the road causing traffic disruption. 

Its time government comes out with clear cut directions when it comes to roads and footpaths in towns and cities. All the residential areas will have a road with clearly marked residential plots. There should be a clear cut directive of ear marked breadth on either side of the road depending on the width of the road. At least 10 to 15 percent of the road width should be used as footpaths on either side combined. The storm water drains should be along the plots and should be covered with perforated slabs and with regular perforations on the side to drain water from the road. The covered storm water drains act as foot paths. Since storm water drains are built in concrete, upper portion can be perforated to run a tunnel like structure where plastic pipes are run with regular entry to individual houses and rented to the all those who want to run cables for different reasons. Water drains can be done on the opposite wall. Since houses are built for lifelong its worth investing and charging a nominal fee for the same for residents. Existing system fails repeatedly and so much of material and manpower are routinely wasted every year digging roads and losing money. It’s wise to run electric cables underground, though initial investments are high like everything else it is also for life and maintenance will be cheaper in the long run. 

Trees can be planted after the storm water drain deeper to the drain depth and trees are chosen selectively which grow straight and looking at their branching pattern suitable. Roads are asphalted with side drainage with not less than one perforation for five feet slab on the sides. Roads have to be clearly marked for central line and lines for the sides. It’s better to have a clear cut line where the parked vehicles should not protrude on to the road. People go by reference hence it is ideal to have a line marked for two and three wheeler to drive to the maximum on left side.

Then comes keeping these for the purposes they are built for. Not allowing anyone to take over the footpath either for gardening, storing their products and the businesses. Government should look in to options to solve hawkers and roadside business start ups.

Typically residential areas are planned with two adjoining rows of housing plots with the common backyard separated by a wall (Commonly in Mysuru) and the front of both rows will have roads with storm water drain, sewage line, water line and electric lines. This has typical problems like I talked about it earlier. What if the backyards both rows of housing plots are separated by common free area of about like 6 feet width. This common area can be used to run sewage, water lines, electric lines and cables. This cuts down the cost as single line is used and split in to individual house plots. Roads can have their tree line and storm drain as usual. There is no digging needed repeatedly as the maintenance easy as the dedicated path is built on the back yard. 

Traffic police across are waste of tax payers money. So much money is used for their presence. I have not seen any contribution from them for the society which is worth. All they ever do is collect money from unsuspecting people in different ways. One of the biggest frauds is their concern for two wheeler riders without helmet. And not about millions who are being killed by the irresponsible drivers. When you can’t solve speeding drivers you just put road humps every hundred meters. As they can’t control irresponsible drivers, they just slow down the traffic by placing barricades. Qualified IPS in top posts were supposed have solutions while we find them without common sense, forget about streamlining traffic. I have never seen any constructive traffic management solutions from the traffic police in my life.

Traffic management and irresponsible law management are the ones we have gotten in to this state. Both come under police. Forget about proactive actions even the basic actions are not done by them because of the greed and corruption. They may blame other departments, yet those would have co operated if these two had some effort put in. 

This is high time to concentrate and start from basics. So far whatever was in place has not worked it’s time think about it in a way to solve the existing ones.