Some major Kathmandu streets have recently been lit up with the installation of solar street lamps. Lane markers have been freshly painted and potholes filled in. So much and more was done for the 18th Saarc Summit. But just this beautification will not improve our daily experiences of traffic jams and unsafe roads. We need more ideas and actions that can make Kathmandu’s streets a place for people.

Streets as public spaces

Streets do not comprise of automobiles alone—they have pedestrians and cyclists too. However, their presence may not always be as evident, as road designs are not supportive and considerate about the latter two’s presence. Therefore, there is a need to rethinking our streets as public spaces and draw the attention of planners to the social connection people make in the streets while interacting.

The conception of streets as public spaces is one important guideline—along with designs for appropriate speeds and plans for community outcomes—to be followed by engineers while designing streets. But our experiences confirm the absence of such considerations in the planning of most of Nepal’s roads, especially in Kathmandu.

Kathmandu is accommodating more people every day and with them grows the number of people having horrific experiences in the city. Thus, facilitating social life on the streets can make a significant impact on our lives. Many surveys conducted around the world have discovered that green spaces generate positive attitudes and improve mental well-being. Planners, thus, have begun to consider the experience of users through their senses, such as smell and sight. Kathmandu is undoubtedly a beautiful historic city with innumerable sights which are proud of but ironically, the torturous experiences of commuters while being stuck in traffic jams on bridges over rivers like the Bagmati and Bishnumati is also an unavoidable truth.

Streets, therefore, can be more than just a route to reach a destination. They can be a place with wide sidewalks for people to rejoice, meet friends, and have conversations without disturbing the movement of vehicles or pedestrians.

Learning from the Dutch

Every city has its way of addressing the problems of transportation. Project for Public Spaces (PPS)—a non-profit organisation based in New York—has been observing such measures, after realising the need to overthrow the domination of automobiles over people. In a few places, institutions responsible for designing streets have realised the need to make sensible choices in favour of the comfort of all users. The Netherlands is one such example, where streets have been recreated to reduce high fatality rates in road accidents.

Road safety was a critical problem for the Dutch in the 1970s, prompting a national campaign, ‘Sustainable Safety’, which changed the scenario of their streets forever. By rejecting the idea of ‘wider, straighter and faster’, they decided on speed limits within and outside a community. Unlike highways, streets in urban areas are shared by cyclists, pedestrians, and automobiles equally, thereby putting a control on speed limit for their safety.

Reinventing our streets 

As Fred Kent, the founder and president of PPS, once said, “If you plan cities for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. If you plan for people and places, you get people and places.” As such, this is a suitable time for Kathmandu dwellers to realise that streets are shared pieces of public property. Amanda Burden rightly said in one of her talks that “public spaces do not happen by accident”, they have to be designed to facilitate sharing of spaces and personal experiences. Similarly, users too should uphold the responsibility of using spaces and structures with care. A collaborative effort of users and traffic police is required in improving the streets.

This might sound idealistic when looking at the current state of Kathmandu’s streets, but it is not. If a street in the Netherlands can be ‘self explanatory’ and can function without traffic lights, signs, crosswalks, lane markers, or curbs, how difficult can it be in Kathmandu for the traffic police to formulate and explain a set of rules to be followed in the roads, and for the users to follow them for their own convenience?

Tamrakar is a research associate at Social Science Baha ([email protected])