Feb 15th: Whitefield Walk

Video

Is Whitefield Walkable? 60+ walkers decided to take the hashtag#BLRFootpathChallenge and walk 15km ON FOOTPATHS to find out.

50+ completed 5km, and 22 walked all 15kms along the Tech Corridor, with a few detours into Nallurhalli and Dyavasandra. The walker group included senior citizens, high school students, government officers and BBMP staff, and a diverse group of enthusiastic walkers from across Bengaluru who show up whenever called to walk long distances on footpath!

And the verdict? The 15km chosen path is walkable! Really.
Walkers were asked to count the Number of Obstacles enroute that made them leave the footpath – and this turned out to be fewer than 15 (ie, less than 1 per km). They also did a GST Analysis, defined as
G- No of Garbage Spots ON the footpath
S – No of Shops that totally Obstruct the footpath
T – No of Trenches (missing footpath slabs)

And the consensus was that there was 1 (yes, just one) G, 7-8 S, and 6-7 T. For a total of 15. And these are all fixable, and will be addressed.

The walk started at Singayyanapalya Metro, then went past Hood Ji, Graphite Jn, Vydehi, Nallurhalli, Sathya Sai, ITPL and all finishers were treated to a final 1km walk in the green, forest environs of the Kadugodi Tree Park!

The walk was enriched by the enthusiastic presence of high school students from Sparkling Mindz Global who documented the footpath pluses and minuses, as part of their civic action project.

As we have done on the 17 walks done already that covered 125km of footpaths, we look for wide footpath stretches and measure their person-width (how many person-lanes wide the footpath is). We discovered 1 footpath stretch that was 13-person wide, and a few others that could accommodate 10 pedestrians walking next to each other! (See pics below)

Well done Whitefield! This was Walk #18 in the hashtag#BLRWalkFest. There will be more walks soon in other parts of Mahadevapura/Whitefield, this is just the beginning.