Ashish Gajurel

A city that offers a good lifestyle is one where people enjoy being outdoors and which is hospitable to the elderly, children, poor and handicapped. A good transportation system is a basic requirement to fulfill the aforesaid aspects. Unless the roads are safe, no one wants to be outdoors without a pressing reason. Even though they live in it, most city dwellers are not involved in the building of the city because of lack of direct political power.

Citizens who are involved in developing cities do not use the spaces frequented by the common people, mostly because of their higher status which gives them access to privileged areas. They can go for weeks without setting foot in a public space. Cities are normally designed and built by a limited number of people with political power, leaving us to question whether our cities are designed in the interest of the majority. There are several ways to evaluate whether a city is good or not. One of these ways is the traffic system.

Walking is the basic human instinct to move from one place to another. Even in modern cities with a well developed traffic system, walking is still indispensable. A pedestrian crossover bridge is a facility that provides a safe and comfortable environment for pedestrians to move around the city without having to worry about vehicular traffic. A question arises, are crossover bridges invaluable on the streets of Kathmandu? Is building crossover bridges an important aspect of traffic engineering? Let us discuss the pros and cons of these bridges.

A crossover bridge is a type of pedway that is an enclosed or covered bridge between two sides of a road. They are constructed for the safety and convenience of pedestrians. They are aimed at decreasing traffic congestion, reducing vehicular air pollution, separating people from vehicular noise, easing traffic movement and reducing vehicular accidents in the city.

Normally in Kathmandu (especially on the six-lane road of Bhaktapur), whenever a pedestrian has a traffic accident, people generally accuse the government of not building sufficient crossover bridges for crossing the road and footpaths for walking. Can overhead bridge reduce fatality rates? Yes, to some extent, but building sky bridges alone cannot reduce road accidents in Kathmandu. In big cities like Berlin and Munich, such sky bridges are rare (a negligible number of underground passages have been built for people to cross the street), but traffic is well managed there. This example suggests that overhead bridges are not critical components of traffic management.  How useful are overhead bridges for small children, the elderly, sick and handicapped? How would they use them? Building overhead bridges is no more than a quick fix for traffic management. Getting people across the road on them reduces traffic management tasks. Normally, overhead bridges are built at road intersections. Here, one traffic stream should be stopped while the other traffic stream is permitted to pass. In such a situation, pedestrians could cross the road where the traffic stream has been stopped. This is the system of traffic management at crossings used in most modern cities. In such a situation, there does need seem to be a need for an overhead bridge.

Crossover bridges compromise the beauty of the city. While they may be thought to be modern by some, overhead bridges in the central areas of Kathmandu have not added any beauty; instead they have become conducive to criminal activities. Bridges are nowadays safe havens for pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, street vendors and criminals. Moreover, they serve as open toilets for many. Pedestrians hesitate to use them because of the aforementioned problems.

Many people cross the streets below the overhead bridges because they do not like to climb the long stairs to reach the top, walk to the other end, and again walk down the stairs. Most pedestrians will not voluntarily accept the added inconvenience of climbing and walking down the bridge besides wasting time by walking a long distance to just to get to a bridge. Instead, people will cross at the nearest convenient location. And in order to prevent pedestrians from doing so, the transportation authorities will need to erect fences and barriers to force them to use the bridges.

Another solution could be installing lifts or escalators to motivate people to use such bridges because they always look for convenience and time reducing ways of getting around. These factors would also facilitate the movement of handicapped, elderly and sick people as well as children. It could be imagined that children would enjoy using lifts and escalators thus forcing their parents to use the overhead bridges. But these solutions only add to the cost of overhead bridges, and they are only assumptions.

Constructing crossover bridges is expensive and, moreover, investing a huge amount of money on them will not solve major traffic problems. As mentioned earlier, these bridges are primarily used to allow pedestrians to get from one side of the street to the other at only certain locations. Crossover bridges cannot be constructed at every location, and therefore, the main focus of the transportation authorities should rather be traffic management and not building overhead bridges as a band-aid solution. This shift in focus would also help the free flow of traffic when regulations are devised and executed properly.

Kathmandu has suffered from a speedy growth in motorised vehicles with an increase in population and urbanisation which has resulted in a high traffic volume. In turn, this has increased the number of road accidents. To solve this problem, some crossover bridges have been built, and some are being planned.

There is no doubt that crossover brides can be useful tools to control road accidents to some extent, especially vehicle-pedestrian accidents during road crossings, but they cannot ensure free traffic flow without road accidents. They have their limitations. It is difficult to assess whether overhead bridges are indispensable or not without actually removing them. But in the context of Nepal, where people are unaware of the rules and regulations and where they are not strictly implemented, the effectiveness of overhead bridges is certainly not what the designers and planners had envisaged in terms of traffic management at the current moment.

source: Gajurel, Ashish(2011),"Whose idea was that?", The Kathmandu Post,10 July 2011