Delhi has added more rail transit in the 21st century than any other city outside of East Asia. Although the first line did not open until 2002, there are now 190 route kilometers and 2.4 million riders a day. Among North American rail transit lines, only the New York subway is longer and carries more passengers. And the Delhi subway is still growing. Phase III, now being constructed, will add 160 route kilometers. In a few years Delhi will have one of the world’s largest rail transit systems. Delhi Metro is generally considered an enormous success, not least because the lines were apparently built efficiently, with a minimum of corruption, in a country where this is not the norm.
I’ve been on the Delhi Metro twice, on an earlier trip in 2007 and just recently. There are all sorts of tremendously impressive things about the system. The underground stations and the trains are air-conditioned—a fairly important accomplishment given that temperatures in Delhi were well over 100 degrees every day I was there. The stations are quite spacious and subtly lit (they remind me of stations on the Washington Metro). The trains are very much of the modern type. You can walk from car to car. It is true that there are plenty of reminders that you’re in India. The trains can get awfully crowded (except for the women’s car). And passengers getting on seem incapable of waiting for passengers to get off, and there is thus lots of pushing and shoving. Also, it’s a bit unnerving that you have to get your luggage x-rayed and undergo a body search to enter a station (on one day I had to take out every object from a crowded backpack for a zealous guard). Furthermore, there are frequent announcements warning passengers against picking up unattended objects since they could be bombs. Still, who could argue with the proposition that Delhi Metro is a major achievement?
I have one pretty major caveat, however. It’s that it’s practically impossible to walk to the Metro stations, at least in central Delhi.
When I first rode the Delhi Metro in 2007, I decided to follow the elevated line that emerges a few blocks west of Connaught Circle, to take pictures and to get a feel for how the line fit into the neighborhoods it passed through. I gave up after a couple of stations. One problem is the near absence of sidewalks along the route (see below). In most cases a sidewalk had once been built, but it’s been encroached on in places and has not been maintained in others, so that there is more trash-filled pothole than sidewalk. Most Indians just walk in the traffic lane. Even more serious, you take your life in your hands every time you want to cross a street. There are few traffic lights, and little attention is paid to those that exist. Some Indian intellectuals say they hate the anthropologist Louis Dumont’s phrase “homo hierarchicus,” an attempt to characterize the Indian people in light of the caste system. But there is no doubt that there is a hierarchy on Indian roads. Third World traffic rules are in force everywhere. The larger vehicle has the right of way, and pedestrians have no rights at all. Even though automobile ownership is not that high, Delhi is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly cities in the world—especially British-planned New Delhi with its innumerable roundabouts. You end up wondering just how people get to the Metro stations (or anywhere else). A surprising number take auto or bicycle rickshaws short distances just to avoid having to walk. There may be fewer pedestrians in central Delhi than in any other large city anywhere. There are many fewer pedestrians in the blocks around around Connaught Circle than in, say, downtown Los Angeles, which is famous in North America for being a car-oriented place. In downtown Los Angeles paved sidewalks are universal, and you can cross streets safely.
I visited Gurgaon on my last trip to Delhi. Gurgaon is Delhi’s Rosslyn or Schaumburg or La Défense. Many successful firms have built high-rise office buildings in Gurgaon. There’s also a huge amount of middle- and upper-class housing. A new elevated Metro line to one of Gurgaon’s major office complexes just opened a couple of months ago. It connects to a branch of the Metro that opened approximately a year ago. Both lines were jammed despite the fact that service is frequent, and I had to stand all the way back to central Delhi. But even in shiny-new Gurgaon it’s painful to get to the stations. There are numerous pedestrians in Gurgaon’s office district—and almost no provision made for them. You often have to walk in moving traffic or across muddy fields to get where you’re going (see below).
Some Indians attribute the pedestrian-unfriendliness of Indian cities to cultural factors other than the caste system. It is certainly true that Indians on the whole are probably less interested in fitness than just about any of the world’s peoples. You almost never see runners or recreational bicyclists in Indian residential districts. Still, there are plenty of middle-class Indians who enjoy walking. Small parks all over urban India have de facto tracks where people walk in circles. I spent a couple of hours on my last trip to Delhi in Lodi Garden, a wonderful park in New Delhi that contains several enormous centuries-old tombs; lots of large trees (and therefore shade); and thousands of noisy birds. It may be the most pleasant place in Delhi. And it’s just big enough to contain an approximately one-mile walking loop. Amazingly, there were a very large number of people there making the circuit, including some women (see below). It’s true that the park also has a substantial population of unowned dogs, but they do seem to let people pretty much alone (although they can bark furiously at owned dogs being walked on leashes). Clearly, some Indians would walk to Metro stations if it were easier to do so.
Delhi of course is hardly the only Third World city where pedestrians are treated with contempt. But, unlike its close competitors in this area (Jakarta and Hanoi, for example), it has made a substantial investment in a form of transport that appears to function fully only when pedestrian access is possible. It’s true that, even as it is, Delhi’s subway is working for millions of people. But a sympathetic foreigner can’t help but wonder whether it wouldn’t be even more of a success if something were done about making it less of an ordeal to walk to the stations. I acknowledge that it would not be a trivial matter to change India’s driving culture—or its long-standing indifference to keeping sidewalks clear.
–May 2014