Supreme Court Clearing A Path For Pedestrians
· Free Press Journal
Pedestrians across the country will wholeheartedly welcome the Supreme Court’s latest order on road safety for underscoring their fundamental right to walk on safe and well-demarcated footpaths and also, importantly, deploring policies that prioritise the movement of vehicles over people. The ground truth is that although pedestrians are invisibilised by car-centric urban development, they remain the largest segment of road users at 63%, as per a 2019 survey. There are 45 million people who walk to work every day, compared to 54 lakh using motorised personal transport. In asserting the rights of walkers over vehicle users, the bench, made up of Justices PS Narasimha and AS Chandurkar, has expanded the jurisprudence that evolved in earlier cases before the court, notably Rajasekaran vs. Union of India. Through that order, the court, inter alia, directed governments to form state and district road safety committees. But the Union government has, disappointingly, not abided by the direction to notify a National Road Safety Board in spite of repeated deadline extensions. Today’s condition of the pedestrian has been pithily captured by the court when it castigated motorists for viewing walkers as a nuisance. To this must be added the hostility of policymakers, who invariably are car-borne, privileged on the road by governmental authority and unaware of the realities of everyday commuting for millions. It comes as no surprise that pedestrian infrastructure—safe, demarcated, and unobstructed footpaths—receives lip service and token budgets while the massive financial outlays are reserved for flyovers, tunnels, road widening, and multi-level parking to serve cars. The right to park overrules the right to walk.
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The way forward to assert pedestrian rights and compel city governments to move to a new mobility paradigm lies in carrying out a court-monitored pedestrian safety audit. Here, the amicus and special committee appointed in the Rajasekaran case provides a good example. Every urban ward could be audited as per Indian Roads Congress standards for pedestrian infrastructure, assessing compliance with the law on disabilities and making the respective civic body, road-owning agency, and traffic police system accountable. In parallel, an active citizenry could bring legal pressure on public officials, utilising the court’s support for restitution of walking rights to get relief for specific problem locations. Pedestrians frequently encounter special interests in policymaking. When faced with pressure for pedestrianisation, the political class, officials, and special interests benefiting from the status quo use the artifice of conflict between walking and hawking to prevent change. They are helped by distortions in the 2014 law on street vending rights, which is conveniently used to marginalise pedestrian rights when, in fact, there is adequate room for both walking and vending if motorists are made to pay the true cost of using urban space. The first-order priority for pedestrian rights is to demarcate footpaths, remove obstructions, and create a walking environment of universal design that enables their use by all, including the disabled.