‘Share the Road’ is a citizen-centric digital initiative to promote non-motorised transport (NMT) through citizen participation and data-driven decisions. The initiative is developed by Team Stride of the India Smart Cities Fellowship Programme in partnership with Chennai Smart City Limited. The solution is in the form of a mobile application and has the features to gather infrastructure and service improvement ideas and feedback from the citizens. The application also allows citizens to vote and comment on NMT and street design projects and contains crowd-mapped data on good walking and cycling routes as well as cycle repair, rental and retail units spread across Chennai.
Score streets and places as per walking and cycling experiences
Share walking or cycling-related improvement ideas and geo-tag problematic spots
Share feedback on public space and street design projects
Find citywide cycling facilities such as repair, rental, retail shops and parking spaces
Map any cycling facility nearby
Explore interesting walking and cycling routes in the city
‘Share the Road, Chennai!’ will positively impact the walking and cycling prospects in Chennai city, as we believe it will invite more citizen engagement, ease the service delivery for non-motorised transport users and help generate data to inform the decision-making.
There is a lot of enthusiasm for walking and cycling in Chennai city. The initiative adds to the momentum by creating a mechanism for effective citizen engagement. It enables the improvement of non-motorised transport infrastructure incrementally to create a walkable and cyclable Chennai.
‘Share the Road’ initiative invites the people of Chennai to share their feedback on the planning and design of streets and public spaces. The data aggregated through the app will be analyzed to improve the NMT services in Chennai. It builds a culture of data-driven decision-making.
‘Share the Road’ is a step forward towards adopting low-emissions transport. This initiative is going to have a positive impact on pedestrians and cyclists in Chennai as it revolves around citizen participation and data-informed decisions.
The App helps people choose a cycling or walking route based on greenery, safety, distance, etc. It also allows people to explore the city by bicycle or foot.
The crowdsourcing campaigns that were part of the initiative have benefitted cyclists like me, who can access rare information on cycling amenities and routes. This improves our commute and helps us safely walk and cycle in the city.
Architect and Planner
Architect
Architect
ITDP India
National Institute of Urban Affairs
At the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, walking and cycling saw a renewed interest globally due to the need for physical distancing and decongestion of streets, roads and public spaces. Cities like London and Singapore swiftly transformed their streets to accommodate walking and cycling infrastructure. In India, the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs promoted walking and cycling as healthy commute choices through a series of initiatives, such as Cycles4Change and Streets for People challenges. Share the Road was conceptualised in alignment with these global and national efforts to mainstream non-motorised transport in Indian cities.
With a vision to localise the SDGs 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and 13 (Climate Action), Team Stride conceptualized ‘Share the Road’ in the form of a citizen application and successfully pitched the idea to the Joint Secretary and Mission Director (SCM). The ideation phase included empathising with the people, places and processes associated with non-motorized transport, understanding the challenges of NMT in Indian cities and consulting with the stakeholders to envision possible solutions. The ideation enabled the team to arrive at a set of use-cases for the application - based on the underlying philosophy of people’s involvement in decision-making as the cornerstone of Smart Cities.
Leveraging on the mentorship of domain experts, the team concretised the idea and arrived at the pilot city through a rigorous stage-wise selection process that ranked 100 smart cities on various NMT-related parameters.
The team consulted a range of experts to vet the idea, which included MoHUA officials, stalwarts from institutions like IISc Bengaluru and IIT Madras, domain experts from international organisations like SeeSense and VivaCity, NPOs like ITDP, and citizen leaders and activists from Chennai. The consultation phase included surveying citizens and understanding their needs and aspirations related to walking and cycling in their city. Through the surveys, the opinion of citizens on the utility of use-cases was solicited and based on the feedback, course corrections were made.
Consultations were also carried out with the officials of Chennai Smart City and Greater Chennai Corporation. The Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner and Smart City CEO provided their valuable inputs, which were duly incorporated into the project. The team also looked at the NMT policy of Chennai, the Comprehensive Mobility Plan and other relevant documents to understand how the solution can improve the planning and policy outcomes and help the people walk and cycle better.
Once the use-cases were finalized, the team obtained the necessary approvals to initiate the development of the application. Design prototypes were created in consultation with the Electronic Data Processing (EDP) department and the Integrated Command and Control Center (ICCC) of the Greater Chennai Corporation. The EDP department provided front-end, back-end, data processing and server support for the development of the application. The City Data Officer provided support in the development of a dashboard to analyze and visualize the incoming app data.
The team reviewed various cases of citizen-centric data collection mechanisms, service delivery applications, specifically for walking and cycling and decision-support dashboards to further shape the application platform.
The development process started with the aggregation of data on walking and cycling services and routes through multiple crowd mapping exercises spanning over months and involving over 350 volunteers. The team used freely available online tools to emulate the application features and tested it with hundreds of volunteers in Chennai. Further, a dashboard was created to analyze and visualize the test data (ideas, feedback, geo-tags). The development also included creating a system for people to geo-tag their walking and cycling challenges in real-time. The development process concluded with the application fully developed, tested and deployed as a module within the Greater Chennai Corporation’s Namma Chennai application. Further, it was tested again with over 100 volunteers before being officially launched.
The team was deployed to develop the Share the Road application at Chennai Smart City Limited, Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC). The first phase of deployment between November 2020 and March 2021 was utilized to finalize the use-cases, and front-end design and gain the necessary approvals to initiate the development process. The first application prototype was completed in March 2021 and presented to the Joint Secretary, MoHUA and Director, SCM. The subsequent deployment phases included refining the interface design, aggregation of data, application frontend, backend and database development, testing and conducting citizen crowd mapping campaigns. The final presentations were made to the Commissioner, GCC, the Joint Secretary, MoHUA and Director, SCM in January 2022.
