Citizen Walkability Assessment
Period: 2026 - Ongoing
To commemorate World Pedestrian Day, the TUL Foundation set out to address a gap that shapes daily life for most residents of Ahmedabad - Walking. Nearly 37% of all trips in the city are made on foot, yet walking remains one of its least planned modes of transport. Rather than relying solely on technical audits, the Foundation turned to citizen-led documentation as a way to build an evidence base grounded in lived pedestrian experience, recognizing that the people who walk a street every day are best placed to identify what makes it work, and what doesn't.
"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody."
— Jane Jacobs, Urbanist, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities
About the initiative
The Foundation organised the Citizen Walking Assessment on Saturday, 8 August 2026, covering selected stretches from Helmet Cross Road to Gujarat University Metro Station. The assessment brought together 70 participants across three routes, children, students, senior citizens, professionals, and with diffrently abled people, including members of the Blind People's Association and wheelchair and crutch users.
Participants walked assigned stretches documenting footpath conditions, crossings, shade, accessibility, and overall street safety, before travelling together by BRTS to Andhjan Mandal for a debrief session built around an interactive reflection exercise. The event was organized by TUL Foundation, aProCh, MyByk, and Urban Voices, as part of AmdavadNXT, a collaborative initiative bringing together citizens, institutions, and government to reimagine public transport, walkability, and public space in Ahmedabad.
What We Found
The assessment surfaced conditions familiar to anyone who walks these streets daily, broken footpaths, crossings with no signal, sidewalks doubling as parking, and stretches with no footpath at all. Beyond visual documentation, the assessment collected 52 perception entries capturing how safe, accessible, and comfortable participants felt stretch by stretch.
Nearly 7 in 10 participants reported feeling unsafe or worse on the routes they walked, citing poor footpath conditions, fast-moving traffic, and difficult crossings as the most common reasons, numbers that reinforced what the visual documentation had already shown.
Outcomes
- Brought together a genuinely mixed group of pedestrians, across age, gender, and mobility, to experience and assess the same streets from their own vantage points.
- Generated a combined dataset of visual observations and 52 perception entries, forming the basis for a street-level Walkability Assessment.
- Demonstrated a replicable model for citizen-led assessments that pairs lived experience with structured documentation.
What we hope to change
The Foundation plans to build these findings into a street-wise Walkability Scorecard that can inform evidence-based conversations with authorities on pedestrian-friendly planning and street improvements. Going forward, the aim is to extend this model beyond single organized events, enabling independent individuals and groups to conduct their own walking assessments using a shared set of parameters, feeding into a larger citywide dataset. Integrating citizen walking assessments into the broader public transport conversation is the next step, with the goal of making pedestrian issues a standing part of how Ahmedabad plans its streets.
