I facilitated a group discussion last week on making Kuala Lumpur a pedestrian friendly city. It is indeed a difficult task of putting pedestrian first rather than the motorist. In Malaysia, many road circulation planning has been done to serve the motor vehicles. None of the planning has started with the people walking behaviour at the centric of development. The planners and engineers has always drew the line of roads starting from major highway to the local collector road, and lastly the pedestrian walkway at the side table of the road reserve.
For planning a pedestrian friendly city, the current practice has to be changed. It must be a bold step of identifying the pedestrian walking behaviour between major focus points first and followed by other traffic infrastructure provision.
Talking about human behaviour, many would like to shorten the distance of walking between the origin and destination, walk under a safer, comfortable, undisturbed and conducive environment. Nobody like to walk under the hot sun. Equally nobody want to be alert attentively for fearing to be robbed. More importantly pedestrian would like to be well respected by other users of the road.
Walking by far is affordable by everyone regardless of their social status and wealth. It is not going to cost any single cent for walking compared to other mode of transportation. Thereby, walking is becoming a basic human right to be enjoyed by all. Providing a conducive, safe, well connected and accessible walkway is essential and critical.
Thereby the discussion summarised that for making Kuala Lumpur a pedestrian friendly city, approaches and mind set of planners and decision makers have to be revamped first in which People ahead of motorist is required.
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Hi. Nice concise article. To add on to it, better public transportation planning would also contribute to building walking habits among Malaysians. Other than that, national policy of cars should be changed so that cars are not so easily obtainable, that the pedestrian infrastructure would be improved, and all together, creating a good walking environment for pedestrians. I personally think that this country has lots of social & economic issues to tackle first before "pedestrian friendly city" can be realized.
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