Delhi tries a little “pedestrianization”

I spent several days last month in Delhi, an urban area I’d visited a number of times over the years, most recently in 2014.

I’ve written about Delhi on this blog before and admitted that it’s one of my least favorite places. The problem is the extreme difficulty of walking pretty much anywhere. The city’s hostility to pedestrians is perhaps most striking in central New Delhi, which was laid out in part under the direction of British architect Edwin Lutyens in the years after 1911 when Delhi was named India’s capital. I can’t claim to be an expert on Lutyens, but it’s pretty clear that he and his colleagues thought that most travel in New Delhi (or anyway travel by officials and important civil servants) would be by motor car. Major streets are wide, and they often meet at roundabouts (traffic circles). There are sidewalks (although they typically haven’t been maintained over the years), but there is usually no provision at all for pedestrians to cross streets. There are few traffic lights and none at all at the roundabouts. The general pattern is that drivers in central Delhi are not made to feel that they ever need to accommodate pedestrians even when they’re making a turn. Many drivers even tend to be rather casual about red lights. As a result, although there are few pedestrians in most of Delhi, hundreds are killed in road accidents every year.¹

Delhi has, of course, grown enormously since the Raj ended 75 years ago. The Delhi area now has a population of more than 32 million, according to the 2022 edition of Demographia world urban areas, which makes it the third largest urban agglomeration in the world. As Delhi has grown outward, autocentric planning has continued with a vengeance. Outer Delhi has hundreds of kilometers of busy, wide roads that could hardly be more pedestrian-unfriendly. This is a problem in part because car ownership even now is limited to fewer than 20% of Delhi’s households.² As in much of the Third World, car ownership is associated with wealth and status, which inevitably bring certain privileges. These are arguably exacerbated in a society like that of India that tends to be extraordinarily hierarchical. Privileging automobiles implies a certain amount of contempt for the region’s very large number of poorer inhabitants—or for anyone (including eccentric foreigners) who prefers to get around on foot.

As is true just about everywhere, Delhi’s dependence on car travel has had many unfortunate consequences other than the frequent killing of pedestrians and the discouragement of any kind of pedestrian life. The area’s air quality is appalling. Traffic jams are frequent. And the vast majority of the population that does not have easy access to automobiles cannot participate fully in the life of the city.

In a major attempt to mitigate some of these problems, Delhi has been constructing a Metro system. No city (with the spectacular exception of half a dozen or so in China!) has built more kilometers of rail rapid transit track in the 21st century. The system is now up to 348 km, and several new lines are under construction. Delhi will soon have a longer Metro system than New York or London (although, unlike the latter cities, it doesn’t have a network of frequent suburban trains).

Here’s a map.

Map emphasizing Metro rail lines in a large part of the Delhi region (including the administratively separate lines in Gurugram and Noida). The map excludes lines still under construction, of which there are several. The nominal scale of the map is 1:250,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 8.5-x-11-inch piece of paper. Most of the basic GIS data come from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap; some of these data have been modified. The map is clickable, enlargeable, and downloadable.

The Delhi Metro is generally considered an enormous success. On most days more than 2.5 million passengers use the system, and trains are much more likely to be uncomfortably crowded than embarrassingly empty.³ There is a consensus that the coming of the Metro has altered the city in many complicated and generally healthy ways. It’s made it easier for millions of people to move about the urban area. It’s forced people of many social classes to learn to share limited spaces. And, as a huge project built to international standards, it’s provided a kind of model of what Indian urbanism could look like.⁴ The limitation, of course, is that in many cases it’s not very easy for potential riders to get to the stations. The responsibility of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation ends at station entrances. Once you’ve left the station, there is sometimes no sidewalk to walk on, and many streets cannot be crossed safely on foot. Inside the Metro system, pedestrians are treated with respect. There are escalators and elevators in most stations. Many lines have platform gates or doors. Directional signage is abundant. Outside the Metro, pedestrians are treated with contempt. The relationship of Delhi’s Metro to the urban area in which it’s located is, well, pretty strange.

This is not exactly a secret. Many Delhiites are painfully aware of the extent to which automobile hegemony has determined the character of the city’s urban landscape (although they might not put it that way). Public discussion has sometimes centered on driver “impunity.”⁵ There have been numerous proposals to improve conditions for pedestrians, and there have been a number of local projects that attempt to alter the car/pedestrian balance. I’ll be the first to say that I haven’t been in Delhi often enough or followed events closely enough to be able to claim any real expertise on this subject, but I’d heard about some of steps that have been taken, and I tried, when I was in Delhi, to see for myself how some of these have worked.

The “pedestrianization” of Chandni Chowk is one manifestation of the new interest in reining in the automobile. Chandni Chowk is a rare straight street in “Old Delhi” (a.k.a. Shahjahanabad), a densely built-up section of Delhi whose basic morphology dates back to 17th-century Mughal India.⁶ Chandni Chowk has long been known as the major commercial street in Old Delhi. It’s one of the relatively few places in Delhi with a large number of pedestrians. The problem not so many years ago was that the area had become so overwhelmingly crowded as to be barely functional. Merchants’ shops and individual vendors had so encroached on the sidewalk that pedestrians had to walk in the street, which was crowded with motor vehicles, cycle and auto rickshaws, porters carrying supplies to and from shops, and (of course) occasional cows. It could easily take an uncomfortable forty minutes to walk the street’s 1.3 km length even if one didn’t stop to shop. And that may have been faster than a motor vehicle could expect to make the trip. Here’s a map showing the location of Chandni Chowk.

Map of central Delhi showing the locations of Chandni Chowk in “Old Delhi”; Rajiv Chowk (Connaught Circle), the classic commercial center of New Delhi; and the Washington-Mall-like Central Vista, which links several major government buildings. Chandni Chowk is not marked as a pedestrian facility since the street’s “pedestrianization” would not be considered pedestrianization by international standards. The nominal scale of the map is 1:30,000. For source of data, see previous map.

Over the last decade an attempt to “pedestrianize” the street has taken shape. The goal was to help people not in cars by removing motor vehicles. There was also the hope that Chandni Chowk could be turned into a tourist attraction that was, well, charming instead of appalling. The project’s first phase was largely finished in September 2021; additional work is ongoing and planned. It turns out that “pedestrianization”—the term used in newspaper stories and government documents—does not quite mean in India what it means in the rest of the world. The chief change that has been made in the street has been to ban motor vehicles between 9 in the morning and 9 at night. In addition, sidewalks and the main roadway have been repaved. A barrier with some seating areas down the street’s center has been installed. Cleanish toilets have been made available. Pedestrian-oriented directional signs have been put up. An agreement was also reached to clean the street and remove trash more regularly.⁷

Barriers and signs at one end of the “pedestrianized” Chandni Chowk.

Chandni Chowk has indeed changed, but the street has not been pedestrianized in the usual Western sense. Most pedestrians keep to the sidewalk, which may be just about the most pristine in India; there are few if any cracks or missing pieces. (Sidewalks in Indian cities are rarely maintained.) The catch is that merchants are still encroaching on the pedestrian right of way to some degree. There are also hundreds of individual vendors who spread their wares out on the sidewalk. An additional complication is that dozens of dogs spend their day sleeping where people are supposed to be walking. You do not want to step on these creatures. (And I did see one cow on the sidewalk.) It’s still not easy to walk the length of the street efficiently, but it’s definitely become a lot easier than it used to be.

Most pedestrians on Chandni Chowk use the crowded sidewalks rather than brave the roadway.

The roadway in Chandni Chowk. Most traffic now consists of cycle rickshaws. There are also a few pedestrians.

As for the roadway, the ban on motor vehicles is clearly not enforced very assiduously if at all. Numerous motorcyclists (whose presence is specifically forbidden) ply the street, as do a few cars. Most vehicles are cycle rickshaws, as was intended. The catch is that many more cycle rickshaw drivers have been attracted to the street than there are possible riders, and they line up at the ends of the street hoping to be hired. They take up a lot of space.

Cycle rickshaw drivers lined up waiting for customers to appear.

A major complication is that, perhaps in part because deliveries by motor vehicle during the day are not allowed, there are still numerous people carrying things to shops. These porters can be hazardous to pedestrians.

Porters making deliveries to shops.

Chandni Chowk these days doesn’t look anything like the idyllic, half-empty street shown in the photoshopped publicity photos that were released while it was being rebuilt. It’s still a crowded, bustling, and, well, very Indian place. But the street’s “pedestrianization” is one of Delhi’s first attempts at reining in motor vehicles, and the changes really have made it a more comfortable place for visitors who want to move about on foot. It doesn’t feel the least bit like a pedestrianized street in, say, the centro storico of an Italian hill town, but, then again, would we really want it to? (Let me add that motorcyclists can be a problem in pedestrianized parts of European cities too.)

In conjunction with the “pedestrianization” of Chandni Chowk, there have been a few other changes in Old Delhi that seem to favor pedestrians. Large parts of Old Delhi have “streets” that are too narrow for automobiles and so have always been pedestrian-oriented (even if they aren’t classified that way in the OpenStreetMap database I’ve been using for maps). There have been a few additions to this de facto pedestrianization. For example, a well-marked pathway—with a roof in places!—has been constructed from the Chandni Chowk Metro station to Chandni Chowk proper.

Pathway from Chandni Chowk Metro station to Chandni Chowk. Note the directional signage aimed at pedestrians. Such signage is common in the Metro but very rare on the streets of Delhi (it’s also one of the features of the renovated Chandni Chowk).

Just beyond the eastern end of the street, a shiny new traffic light has been installed that’s designed to facilitate pedestrian access to the Red Fort. This seems like the most trivial of changes, but the installation of a serious traffic light at a key intersection is such an event in Delhi that there have been substantial newspaper stories about it.⁸ I don’t know, however, the extent to which it’s been possible to get drivers to pay attention when the light turns red.

As noted above, one of the problems with the Metro has been that it’s so painful to walk to the stations. Not far away from Chandni Chowk, patrons who wanted to travel between the New Delhi railway station and the two Metro stations built to serve the station formerly had to cross a major roadway and a space where taxis and cycle and auto rickshaws waited for train passengers. A bridge has just been built here to make the transfer a little easier (2022). It comes with escalators and elevators.

There have also been several additional pedestrian-oriented changes in Delhi’s urban landscape, and I believe that there are others. Examples include an expensive 1.2 km (!) elevated walkway between the Durgabai Deshmukh South Campus station on the Metro’s Pink Line and the Dhaula Khan station on the Orange Line in southern Delhi (2019); a pedestrian bridge over several highways at the Pragati Maidan Metro station (2021); improvements in the “Central Vista” including the Kartavya Path (Rajpath) in Delhi’s central Washington-Mall-like linear parkland (2021-ongoing); and the construction of Aerocity (2011-ongoing), one of the few places in Delhi where pedestrians have been quite self-consciously accommodated from the first day.

It’s hard, however, not to be cynical about some of these “improvements.” When government officials in Delhi (and other Third-World cities) build elaborate bridges and tunnels for people on foot, they no doubt congratulate themselves, thinking that they’re doing something for pedestrians. But in cities in what we call the developed world—in North America, Western Europe, and parts of eastern Asia and Oceania—pedestrians in business districts and major residential areas are hardly ever made to trudge up and down stairways to cross streets. To facilitate pedestrian street-crossing, the authorities install traffic lights that everyone expects drivers to obey, and pedestrians are able to traverse roadways without having to think about it very much. It could be argued that the construction of pedestrian bridges and tunnels in Delhi reflects the unquestioned belief that the free movement of traffic is more important than the needs of mere pedestrians and that pedestrians who can’t or who’d rather not have to use stairways to cross streets are just out of luck. These facilities can be viewed as (rather expensive!) ways to put pedestrians in their place, to establish a hierarchy of urban residents in which drivers of automobiles are at the top. They do not really change automobile hegemony in any way even if they’re making life a little easier for people who are walking (as long, that is, as they can manage stairways).

Delhi remains for the most part a difficult city for pedestrians. I’ll admit that, when I’ve shared my thoughts on this subject with certain middle-class Indians, they’ve expressed some puzzlement. They don’t really understand why anyone would want to walk anywhere in a polluted place like Delhi (perhaps overlooking the fact that some people have no choice, including many potential Metro passengers). They don’t in any case see why urban walking should be prioritized in any way. I acknowledge that I may be trying to impose an obsessive urban walker’s preferences on a culture that has quite different values. But, clearly, some people in Delhi do recognize that there’s a problem, and, little by little, people in a position to make changes have been trying to do so.