It's taxing to be a Delhi woman

An aam aurat leaving work in Delhi at 9 pm usually faces a choice her male colleagues may barely notice. The bus ride costs ₹50, and the daily trip ends in a 15-min walk down a poorly-lit lane. A taxi costs ₹300 and ends at her door. Across 15 journeys a month, the difference between the two modes of transport amounts to ₹3,750. No budget records this sum. Yet, it falls on women with the regularity of a tax.

Around this levy, a safety economy has grown: pepper sprays, personal alarms, tracking devices and self-defence classes. Larger costs are harder to quantify: the longer route chosen for its crowds, or the better job that was declined because the commute would have ended after dark. Risk has been privatised. Instead of making the city safer, urban design often leaves women to purchase their own security.

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The deeper problem lies in how cities are planned. Delhi's master plans have inherited a model that separates homes, workplaces and commercial areas, connecting them through roads designed around peak-hour commuting. It assumes a worker whose day follows a straight line, from home to office and back.

Women's journeys are different. India's Time Use Survey 2019 found that women spent an average of 299 mins a day on unpaid domestic services, compared with 97 mins for men. Their travel often involves school drop-offs, shopping, healthcare and caregiving. These trips are dispersed and frequently undertaken on foot. A metro network may serve the commute while leaving the pedestrian experience untouched.

Vienna offers a different starting point. In the early 1990s, observations of park use revealed that girls' participation declined around the age of 10 as boys' ball games increasingly dominated open spaces. The city responded by redesigning parks into smaller zones, creating multiple entrances, improving visibility and arranging seating to encourage social interaction. The principle was simple: safety depends not only on illumination but also on whether public spaces are visible, accessible and occupied.

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Seoul's Women-Friendly City Project, launched in 2007, similarly sought to incorporate women's experiences into urban planning. Measures included safer return-home routes, improved lighting, emergency facilities and better public toilets.

Four changes are essential:

Make safety audits mandatory for neighbourhoods and transport corridors, with women participating in design and implementation. Gender-disaggregated mobility data should inform every zonal plan.

Planning regulations must address the street edge. Blank walls and inactive frontages make pedestrian routes less inviting. Vendors and tea-sellers, whose presence provides informal surveillance, should be recognised as contributors to street safety, rather than routinely removed through eviction drives.

Last-mile connectivity deserves as much attention as the metro network. Well-lit auto and e-rickshaw stands, feeder buses aligned with working hours, and night services that bring passengers closer to home can reduce exposure to unsafe streets.

Public toilets must be treated as essential urban infrastructure, not optional amenities.

The institutional challenge is considerable. In Delhi, responsibility is divided among DDA, municipal bodies, Delhi government, Delhi Metro, police and RWAs. A master plan can prescribe active frontages and safer streets. But implementation depends on agencies with different priorities and jurisdictions. Gender and safety impact assessments should, therefore, be required for major public projects and urban layouts, while gender budgeting should scrutinise infrastructure expenditure rather than merely count women-specific schemes.

Delhi's 2047 vision should be judged not just by how brightly the capital is lit, or how many kms of metro it builds, but also by whether women can move through the city at ordinary hours, without paying extra for the privilege of feeling safe.

Tanu and Khan are Dubai and New Delhi-based architects, respectively