The quality of a city's sidewalks (footpaths,pavements) are, in my opinion, a measure of the culture and civilisation that founded that city. It tells you how much you care about others and yourself. Sidewalks serve many purpose. To walk of course. But good sidewalks ensure a pedestrian's safety. Sidewalks are where you stroll and do your window shopping. Where poor and rich entrepreneurs set up shop and earn their livelihood. Where tourists and locals sip coffee and contemplate about life. Where, in residential neighbourhoods, children play. Only when you visit a pedestrian friendly city do you realise the importance of sidewalks.
Yet many cities, and Chennai is no exceptions, pay so little attention to sidewalks. Not all of this neglect is mean spirited. A lot of it is well intentioned. As wealth in cities increase, coupled with bad "public" transportation, more people end up buying their own modes of transportation. This leads to clogged roads and other related traffic problems. City "planners", or reacters (as they seem to react more than plan,) widen roads. This usually means removing sidewalks and extending the area covered by blacktop (tar). Roads in many areas, if not most, reach right up to the footsteps of shops and homes. This to them is modernisation and progress.
You can very easily get fooled by this. I was. When I drove around the city in a car, upon my returned to Chennai after many years, I was very impressed by the newly widened roads. It seemed like more space for me and my car. But it didn't take long to figure out that this kind of widening of roads actually made matters worse.
When you have wide user friendly sidewalks, people walk on them. Vendors of various kind set up shop on them. All buying and selling happen on the sidewalks. This means that there is a clear separation between pedestrians and vehicles, including cycles. A motorist then have to contend only with other motorists and cyclists. Take the sidewalk away, all the people, vendors and their shops now are on the road, where the sidewalk used to be. So not only have you not gained any additional space for vehicles, you have also endangered the lives and limbs of pedestrians, since there is no longer any barrier between them and speeding vehicles.
One step supposedly forward, many many steps back !
The fact that we destroy sidewalks is a symptom of something much bigger. We don't care about ourselves and our fellow human beings. People to us are a burden. Decades of constant socialists chanting that population is the root cause of all our problems, and not governments' disastrous economic policies, was bound to have equally disastrous social and psychological effects on the population. Population, that is us by the way. For a long time we figured we could blame the others - migrant villagers, slum dwellers, poor, illiterate who infect our city slums - and get away with it. Never did we think that population meant us - you and me. When we look at population as a burden, then someone else is looking at us as burden.
So when the city bureaucrat demolishes the sidewalks, he is only doing what he is taught all his life. You the pedestrian is a burden. Screw you. Walk somewhere else.
Add lack of proper zebra crossing, things protruding out of road that make vehicles swerve from side to side at high speeds, potholes, malfunctioning traffic lights and so on. What you have is bad and unhealthy chaos. Devaluation of human beings. One of the most sadly fascinating sights I had on the streets of Delhi, was the face of a terrified old woman, trying to cross the road, while vehicles went zooming past her. That old lady - someone's mother, wife, daughter or friend - did not have a place in that city. She was a burden.
All this, in my opinion, has cascading bad side effects. Degrading the value of a human being day in and day out on our streets, in subtle ways and in very obvious ways, is bound to have side effects. Unintended consequences.
Read my earlier posting on 'Broken Window' theory. Institutions and environment determine how people behave. Next time when you see people behaving like cattle on the street and cattle like people. Next time when the authorities violate someone's rights on the streets, police beating up someone on the street out of sheer frustration if not anything else, when you see fist fights on the street, man lying bloodied and the vehicle that hit him is nowhere in sight, rise in pollution and respiratory problems due to unruly, clogged traffic. Remember, it may all have started with the non-existent or unusable sidewalk.
Cities exists for people. People created the cities. Cities can be and must be people friendly. And this has nothing to do with the size of the population. (Proof, studies, essays supporting this dramatic claim, and there are plenty by the way, will be provided someday.) Cities need to become pedestrian centric. People centric.
So more clean, safe, sidewalks now !