World class streets in Chennai to be a reality?

Chennai: There is not a soul in the city who does not curse his or her fate when using the city roads. If the bumpy rides on the pothole-filled city roads are not enough, the huge pile up of vehicles due to poor regulation at the junctions and poor planning of roads and pavements add to their woes.

But now, there is some light at the end of the tunnel. The new design of the roads and streets in the city has been envisioned by Chennai City Connect, an infrastructure platform for urban development involving the city’s stakeholders, pledge to provide better usage of road space through better planning and design. This they have done without compromising the ‘Indian sensibilities’, claim the architects.

Roads of a particular city are the indicators of how a society takes care of its people, says Kavitha Selvaraj, Director, CR Narayana Rao LLP. In India, they can at best be termed dismal. While examples of good road design are abound in Europe and even Singapore, all designs cannot be simply adapted to the Indian conditions. “While designing the roads, we believe that the thrust should be on safety, mobility, pedestrian accessibility, liveability, sensitivity to the local context and creative use of street space,” Kavitha explains.

The design prototype developed by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) and Chennai City Connect, lays stress on promoting public transport, exclusive bicycle lanes, pedestrian walkways, carriageway for private vehicles, slots along the walkway for street vendors, space for public gathering and slots for parking. For narrow roads, the entire width of the road should be designed as a slow zone while on wider streets, a separate slow zone should be defined.

While a major thrust should be laid on providing footpaths on all major roads, the pedestrian space should be marked with at least two metres of continues space for walking.

"While cities like Chennai are investing in high quality public transport system, including Metro Rail and Bus Rapid Transit System, little attention has been paid on how passengers would access the transit stations," lamented Kavitha.

At the moment, City Connect is involved in building capacity among the Corporation engineers. The 60 roads that have been selected would first be redesigned by the engineers as per the prototype and a critical analysis would be done before the designed are okayed for execution, says Kavitha.