Accessibility of Bus Stops for Pedestrians in Delhi

Walking, including access trips to public transport (PT), constitutes similar to 60% of commute trips in urban India. However, the quality of pedestrian infrastructure remains poor in Indian cities, leading to inconvenience and high risk to pedestrians. To assess this quality, pedestrian accessibility audits were conducted around 360 bus stops in Delhi. To ensure representativeness, bus stops were selected based on multicriteria stratified sampling, with the following three criteria: relative risk of pedestrian fatality, socioeconomic variables, and distance from city center. The Public Transport Accessibility (PTA) toolkit was used, which has a specific checklist of measurable definitions for rating the access indicators. PTA scores for pedestrian accessibility were predominantly low across Delhi. There was significant spatial clustering of the scores, indicating spatial disparity in the quality of pedestrian infrastructure, which was found to be in tandem with the spatial disparity of income levels. The authors advocate that this toolkit can be used effectively by city authorities and policymakers to undertake location- and indicator-specific improvements in pedestrian infrastructure around PT stops. This toolkit is pertinent for Indian cities, because virtual streetscape audit tools are not currently available. (C) 2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.