Thursday, August 03, 2006

What makes sidewalks unusable

For a long time I have been wondering why people do not use pedestrian footpaths along roads. I have been observing various reasons why people are not using sidewalks. Here are some of them (in no specific order) in brief,

  • electric posts, telephone posts in the footpath,
  • narrow footpaths,
  • shops protruding into the footpath,
  • encroachments of the footpath by shops, footpath vendors, hawkers,
  • people waiting in the footpath (in large number) for buses and other means of transport
  • open manholes in the middle of the footpath,
  • tiles of the foothpath broken for laying cables, wires and desilting drainages and not replaced properly,
  • using footpath to store construcion materials for the nearby construcion site,
  • footpaths too high from the level of the road for senior citizens and children to step into,
  • too many discontinuities in the footpath (due to both avoidable and unavoidable reason)
  • using footpath to park vehicles,
  • people convening regularly for gossiping (I regularly notice this peculiar scence in Lawrence Road),
  • people never use an obnoxious footpath. When people stop using it, it further become a place for wrong deeds - it becomes a cycle (this is more common for footpaths along long perimeter wall) .

2 comments:

narad63 said...

Hi,

This is the sorry state of our town. Having narrow streets with congested road traffic and many obstructions..... how a common man can use the footpath? The Authorities must have some broadmind to implement the schemes and should have a thorugh knowledge whether the scheme will be benificial to common man or not. Most of the schemes are nowadays benificial to themselves alone

Jean-Claude said...

Exactly Damodaran, whatever the scheme, all are 'beneficial' to them.

Like any other city in our country, encroachments are always a problem. Especially commercial establishments flout all the rules.