Who Gets the Footpath?

Try this, if you are able-bodied and have twenty minutes. Walk a kilometre in a straight line along any arterial road in this city and count the number of times you are forced onto the carriageway. Parked scooters. A transformer. A pile of sand. A slab that has collapsed into the drain beneath it. A tree, planted in the middle of a path narrower than the tree. A step up, a step down, another step up, with no ramp anywhere.

Now imagine doing it in a wheelchair. Or with a white cane. Or carrying a toddler and a bag of vegetables. Or at seventy-eight, with a hip that does not forgive a missed step.

The footpath is the piece of public infrastructure that the largest number of people use and that receives the least protection. It is where every other utility goes when it needs somewhere to be, because it is the only part of the road nobody powerful is using. It gets dug for cable, filled badly, dug again, and gradually converted into parking by simple accumulation. And unlike a pothole, which generates complaints because it damages vehicles, a broken footpath mostly generates nothing, because the people it fails do not have a channel that gets answered.

I want to resist the easy version of this argument, which blames individual bad behaviour — the scooter parked across the path, the shop that has extended its display. Those are real and they are also downstream. If a street is designed with no parking provision and no enforcement, scooters will end up on the footpath; that is not a moral failure, it is a predictable outcome of a design that left the question unanswered. The behaviour follows the geometry.

What a decent footpath requires is not exotic. A continuous surface at a consistent level, wide enough for two people to pass, with the drain covered and the covers strong enough to take weight. Ramps at every crossing, not at some of them. Bollards that keep vehicles off without blocking a wheelchair. Shade, which in this climate is not a comfort but the difference between walkable and not. None of this is expensive relative to a flyover. It is simply unglamorous, and it cannot be inaugurated.

There is an environmental argument here and I will make it briefly: the shortest, cleanest, cheapest trip is the one taken on foot, and every trip that could have been walked and was driven instead is a small failure of infrastructure rather than of character. People are not choosing cars over walking in a vacuum. They are choosing between a car and a kilometre of broken concrete in forty-degree sun with no shade and no crossing.

But the stronger argument is about who the city is for. A street that only works if you are young, fit, sighted and unencumbered has quietly decided which residents count. That decision is rarely stated out loud, and it is visible in every uncut kerb.

Accessibility gets treated as a specialist concern, something added for a minority. It is not. Everyone is temporarily able-bodied. A city built for the person having the hardest time on that street is a city that works better for all of us, including the version of ourselves we have not met yet.