The Greater Chennai Corporation has won the Euro € 200000 Global Transformative Urban Mobility Challenge from among 50 cities that participated from around the world.
The Special Projects team of Greater Chennai Corporation along with C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group presented the Chennai Urban Street Improvement project to a global team of experts over 2 stages.
The project presented by Chennai envisages:
- Create a template for an integrated urban street network that can be scaled across the city.
- Create a high quality safe street environment for school and college children.
- Create a inclusive streets taking into account the need for a significant number of differently abled students of a school in the project area.
- Create a carbon neutral street network and initiate a ‘Breathing Streets’ program which will reduce the spread and cascading impact of suspended particulate matter.
- Create a safe street design for streets connecting transit stations. Also institutionalize the Last Mile Safe Access Plan to promote safety of the transit riders and also increase public transit ridership.
Accessibility
The street will be designed to be accessible to all the users in the target areas with specific design emphasis on the target groups like economically weaker sections.
Inclusiveness
The Street will incorporate design elements that will increase the accessibility levels for differently abled students, specifically the blind and the hearing impaired.
The street improvement plan will target specific economically weaker sections from the area for an inclusive design. This will provide access to the vulnerable population.
Climate Friendliness
The greening infrastructure will neutralize the carbon emissions coming out of transport and solid waste sectors in the streets.
The street network created will increase the average trip length by walking mode. This would significantly reduce the fossil fuel emissions coming from the transport sector due to increased mode share of pedestrians.
Health
Chennai is the considered the accident capital of India. This is largely correlated to the lack of conducive walking infrastructure in the City. In creating the extended network of walkable streets, the activity level of citizens would significantly improve thereby improving health conditions.
The project aims to create a good walkable street, which would significantly reduce private vehicle usage thereby reducing emissions. This will have a significant health improvement for the citizens.
Integration into wider planning: The aim of this project is to create an integrated street improvement plan that is scalable across the city. Additionally, the city will incorporate Last Mile Safe Access Plan and Breathing Streets’ program to other streets in the City.
