Quantifying the Impact of Street Lighting and Walkpaths on Street Inclusiveness: The Case of Delhi

Abstract

This paper estimates the impact of street features on urban spaces inclusiveness near bus stops in Delhi, India. We mobilise a unique geo-tagged and time-stamped panel dataset constructed on street audits carried out by SafetiPin, a safety audit application for women which rates how safe streets in cities worldwide are over a large set of dimensions. A panel ordered probit model is used to assess the effect of street characteristics around bus stops on the number of people and the gender composition of the crowd for the period 2013-2019. We find that the level of crowding and the gender composition of bus stop surroundings (500m) are both significantly associated with the design urban spaces even when controlling for area unobserved heterogeneity and common time trends. Our results suggest that increasing the lighting from none to at least clear visibility increases the probability to have a crowded street (more than 10 people) by 8%. In addition, implementing a good quality walkpath increases by 6% the probability to have more than 10 people and by 3% the probability to have a very crowded street. Regarding street inclusiveness, we find that increasing the lighting from `None’ to `Brightly Lit’ increases the probability to have some women and children by 1.5%. Moreover, this increases by 2.9% the probability to have a diverse environment, i.e., at least balanced genders or a majority of women. Both results indicate that implementing more lighting in streets increases the chances to have a more diverse environment.