The 20th century urban planning brought the concept of a street from a place into highway for cars and vehicles, but 21st century urban planning is about reversing that mindset and prioritising people living in a city over cars driving through highways.
One government after another keeps pouring crores into wider or widening of roads or on flyovers, and we’re bankrupting our future to do it. Why keep paying to make traffic worse when there’s a cheaper, healthier, more efficient option sitting right in front of us?
Over the years, Bhubaneswar has grown in its vibrant neighbourhood, connected by layers of parallel street forming as grid. But at some point of time, Bhubaneswar drifted away from its founding principles into locking those grids. The results were that people found the distances to visit opposite neighbourhood had increased, whereas previously one could reach there by walking or cycling. So the culture of having car or motorised vehicles brought many unsolved questions without programming.
All that money which goes into road expansion doesn’t even fix the thing it promises to fix — traffic. New lanes fill up almost as fast as you can open them. There’s a name for this, induced demand, and it’s been documented for decades. Yet cities keep signing up for the same expensive cycle. A single kilometre of road-based urban solution can cost hundreds of crores of rupees. That same money could build an entire network of bicycle lanes with pedestrian paths by unlocking existing grids.
So when people say we need more bicycle lanes rather than more wider roads, flyovers or grid-locked highways inside cities, they are actually asking us to rethink how we’re spending public money on finding traffic solutions.
It comes down to how we use limited public space, and who benefits. Bicycle lanes aren’t just weekend recreation strips, they are a real part of how a city moves people. They are cheaper to build, efficient and are beneficial for the health of people who live there.
The money argument is the strongest one. Cities that build protected bicycle lanes tend to see local business pick up. People on bicycle stop more, linger more, and come back more often than drivers blowing past at 60 km an hour. And a separate bicycle lane costs a fraction of what it takes to widen a road or build a new flyover.
A big road expansion project never really ends. It needs constant maintenance, environmental mitigation, and policing, year after year. A bicycle lane or footpath needs almost none of that, and it makes the roads you already have work better by taking single occupancy cars off them. It also hands nearly everyone a cheap way to get around. For a lower income family, skipping the insurance, gas, and repair bills of a car isn’t a small thing.
On the environment, the gap is huge. Transportation is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Commute by bicycle, and you cut your own share of that directly. It’s not some abstract gesture either. It shows up as cleaner air you can actually breathe.
Less idling and less exhaust means better air quality, and that matters most in dense neighbourhoods where pollution tends to hit the people least able to avoid it. Cycling also chips away at a problem we’re bad at solving — how sedentary we’ve become. It slips exercise into a trip you were already going to make, no gym membership or extra hour required. Build the lanes and you’re building a kind of preventative healthcare.
Money spent on bicycle lanes is money saved on chronic illness later — better heart health, fewer cases of diabetes and quieter streets where people live. That’s the case for treating bicycle lanes as core infrastructure.
The space argument is the tough one to answer, especially in a crowded city. One-traffic lane moves about 100 cars an hour. One bicycle lane can move up to 1000 people an hour. Cycling simply gets far more human beings down the same strip of pavement, and it clears out city centres better than any road-widening ever has.
Bicycle lanes also make streets feel human again. Repurpose a lane for bicycle and traffic slows down, which makes things safer for people on foot, for kids, for older residents. People actually meet each other at street level, and neighbourhoods hold together. Flyovers do the opposite. They’re built for speed and separation, and they cut communities in half. Bicycles stitch them back together.
In the end, choosing flyovers or widening roads over more bicycle lanes is choosing to repeat what we already know that doesn’t work. Therefore, investing on bicycle lanes to unlock the grids is choosing something better — less sprawl, healthier people, and streets that make financial sense. We need fewer barriers and more room for people to actually move, like in Bhubaneswar.
Just imagine during the eighties people living on both sides of railway lines that pass in Bhubaneswar are able to walk in each other’s neighbourhood, but today they need a car or vehicle to reach each other’s neighbourhood. Perhaps the railway line became a wall to segregate north side neighbourhood. However, railway line doesn’t only pass in Bhubaneswar, it passes through iconic cities like London, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Paris, Barcelona, etc. But railway lines in these cities didn’t act like a wall, rather they complemented city’s efforts.
It means that the platform or railway line would have been raised, and underpasses built to encourage people to walk or pedal. Similar restriction of movement are visible both sides of Rajpath, Janpath etc. by locking the grids that once uses to be cycling and pedestrians’ paradise. The problem of congestion in Bhubaneswar is its love for car and supporting infrastructure. It means Bhubaneswar must unlock it’s locked grid.
I urge my fellow politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, urban planners, engineers, parents etc. to think if you build streets for driving, you get cars, you see accidents, you see obesity in children etc. On the other hand, if you build streets for pedestrians and cycling, you get more people walking and cycling.
