A bridge built for people should not force them into traffic
Walkability did not fail to arrive in Indian cities. It was engineered to be unavailable to the people who need it most.
Sakshi Saxena, CRO, ArpinCo. |
18 SEPTEMBER 2026
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A bridge built for people should not force them into traffic
Picture yourself on a national highway where traffic is moving at 100 km/h. Fifty metres away stands a foot overbridge built for the express purpose of helping people cross safely. Yet directly beneath it, someone climbs over a median fence, waits for a gap, and sprints across four lanes.
This is not an isolated incident. It happens on expressways in Delhi-NCR, on national highways outside Bengaluru, and near flyovers in Mumbai – often in full view of passing drivers. The easy explanation is that Indians lack discipline or civic sense. But the evidence points to a less comfortable conclusion: the problem is not simply how people behave. It is how infrastructure is designed.
Walkability is not a Western luxury
Walkability – the extent to which people can safely and conveniently reach everyday destinations on foot is often treated as a feature of cities such as Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Tokyo, or Bangkok. In India, it is sometimes dismissed as a Western idea suited to wealthy, temperate, low-density places rather than to hot, crowded cities.
That assumption does not withstand scrutiny. Even if air quality is set aside, Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru are not structurally designed for walking. Nor has Bangkok solved the problem. A recent study of Greater Bangkok found that only about 4% of the metropolitan area was genuinely pedestrian-friendly. The city’s relative advantage is that it has a visible civic and policy debate about walkability, including pedestrian-scoring initiatives, first-mile research, and discussion of 15-minute neighbourhoods around transit lines. India has had fewer such conversations at policy scale, outside a handful of pilot projects.
The numbers are a public-safety warning
India recorded 177,175 road-crash deaths in 2024, according to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, with an average of almost 20 deaths every hour. Pedestrians accounted for 20.6% of those deaths, making them the second-largest victim group after two-wheeler riders.
In 2021, India recorded nearly 29,200 pedestrian deaths, which is more than the combined number of road deaths in the European Union and Japan. The pattern is not difficult to connect to the built environment. In 2024, two-wheelers were involved in 28.4% of pedestrian deaths, while cars, taxis, vans, and other light motor vehicles accounted for a further 25.5%. Together, these vehicles were involved in well over half of pedestrian fatalities: precisely the traffic that a functioning footpath, crossing, or protected waiting area is meant to separate people from.
National highways are especially dangerous. They account for roughly 2% of India’s total road length but were associated with about 31% of all crashes and 36.6% of all road deaths in 2024. Government figures placed before Parliament recorded more than 41,000 pedestrians and cyclists killed on national highways between 2019 and 2022, including more than 10,000 pedestrian deaths in 2022 alone.
City-level data tells the same story. Bengaluru recorded 247 pedestrian deaths in 2022 and 292 in 2023, when pedestrians accounted for nearly one-third of all road fatalities in the city. In 2024, national data placed Delhi first among Indian metros, with 584 pedestrian deaths. These deaths are not occurring because cities have complete, usable footpaths that people choose to ignore. A Comptroller and Auditor General report found that 43% of Bengaluru’s 1,400-kilometre road network had no proper footpath. Mumbai’s 2022 Climate Action Plan reported that only about 22% of the city’s roads were pedestrian-friendly.
This is geometry, not a character flaw
The popular narrative begins to break down when the street is examined from a pedestrian’s point of view. Indian Roads Congress guidelines call for a pedestrian crossing every 200 metres. In practice, that standard is routinely ignored or maybe impossible to achieve. The legal crossing may therefore require a ten-minute detour before a person has even begun to cross the road.
A study of pedestrian behaviour in Kolkata found that waiting time was the strongest predictor of illegal crossing, and not defiance or carelessness. When people are made to wait long enough, many cross anyway. Similar relationships between delay and risky crossing have been documented from Edinburgh to Shanghai. The difference in India is that both the waiting times and the consequences can be far more severe.
Foot overbridges often reveal the same design failure. Investigations in Delhi, Kolkata, and Bengaluru have found bridges located away from actual desire lines, poorly lit, badly maintained, occupied by unauthorised vendors, or unsafe after dark. For a person carrying groceries or a child, climbing several flights of open stairs in 40°C heat competes against the apparent convenience of a ten-second gap in traffic. If the bridge adds time, effort, and fear to an everyday journey, people will often take the riskier route.
An IIT Madras study of pedestrian accidents in Tamil Nadu found that 80% of injured pedestrians were hit while walking on a pavement or crossing at a designated point. This does not make crossing a highway median safe or sensible. It does, however, show why labelling every dangerous crossing a failure of ‘civic sense’ allows the deeper infrastructure failure to escape scrutiny.
Urban infrastructure is still built around the car
Only about one-fifth of India’s population owns a private vehicle. Yet a large share of urban infrastructure spending continues to favour flyovers, expressways, and widened carriageways, while footpaths, crossings, and safe waiting areas remain incomplete or neglected.
The imbalance is visible in the way roads are built. Urban-planning researchers have documented new roads in Delhi constructed without space for pedestrians – no footpath, verge, or protected edge. Flyovers have been built without attached walkways, leaving people with no clearly safe way to cross except at ground level, among moving traffic.
Even where footpaths exist, they are frequently unusable. Parked vehicles, vendor stalls, construction debris, and structures erected by public authorities themselves can consume the strip of road intended for pedestrians. People are then pushed back into the carriageway from which the footpath was supposed to protect them.
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Indian cities have shown that another approach is possible
The strongest counterargument to the idea that India cannot be walkable is India itself. Several cities have demonstrated that walkability is a matter of budget, design, and political priority, not an impossible demand in a hot, dense, lower-income country.
Chennai became the first Indian city to adopt a dedicated Non-Motorized Transport policy in 2014. Working with urban designers, it began rebuilding streets around continuous footpaths and organised parking rather than leaving pedestrian space to ad hoc encroachment.
Pune has gone further through its Complete Streets approach, its Walk Smart pedestrian policy, and the Pune Streets Programme, which aims to redesign 100 kilometres of roads. Projects on streets such as JM Road and MG Road have introduced dedicated cycle tracks, organised vendor zones, and play areas. The city has also directed a substantial share of its transport budget towards sustainable mobility since 2016 and has held an annual Pedestrians’ Day since 2021.
Nagpur committed ₹147 crore under the Smart Cities Mission to footpaths, crossings, and tactile paving for people with visual impairments. The design explicitly considered children, older people, and people with disabilities – not only vehicle movement. In August 2026, Mumbai’s civic body launched a ‘Pedestrian First’ campaign, removing longstanding exemptions that had allowed parking and temporary structures on footpaths and beginning encroachment-removal drives across the city’s wards.
None of these initiatives solves the national problem overnight. They do, however, demonstrate that poor walkability is not a fact of nature. It is the cumulative result of thousands of choices about where road-widening money goes, where a crossing is placed, and whether a flyover includes a walkway. Those choices can be made differently.
The person under the bridge is not the whole story
Return to the person climbing the median beneath a working footbridge. That person is not simply a symbol of Indian civic failure. They are also the predictable outcome of a system that may have placed the bridge away from the natural crossing point, made the legal route costly and exhausting, and designed the surrounding road primarily for the fifth of the population that drives.
Walkability is not an imported lifestyle aesthetic. It is a public-health and road-safety measure. By that measure, Indian cities are failing tens of thousands of people every year. The question is not whether Indians can walk safely in their own cities. It is whether their cities will finally be built to let them.
Sources
The article draws on the following reports, studies, and published analyses. Source names have been retained from the supplied draft; links can be added if publication-ready citations are required.
- Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, “Road Accidents in India 2024.”
- OpenCity.in analysis of MoRTH 2024 data.
- The Policy Edge summary of the MoRTH 2024 report.
- The Tribune reporting on Parliament data concerning highway pedestrian and cyclist deaths, 2019 – 2022.
- Deccan Herald reporting on Bengaluru, Delhi, and pedestrian-fatality trends.
- National Crime Records Bureau, “Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India 2023.”
- Bosch Ltd, “Pedestrian Accident Study for India” (2023).
- Comptroller and Auditor General of India report on Bengaluru footpath coverage.
- Mumbai Climate Action Plan (2022).
- Economist Intelligence Unit, Global Liveability Index 2026.
- NAJUA journal study of walkability in Greater Bangkok.
- Frontiers in Built Environment study of first-mile walking in Bangkok.
- ITDP India and Urban Design Lab reporting on Pune’s Complete Streets programme.
- RTF case studies on Nagpur’s footpath initiative.
- Free Press Journal reporting on Mumbai’s 2026 “Pedestrian First” campaign.
