We rarely look at a concrete flyover and see a moral argument. To most of us, a road is just a road, and a bridge is merely a math problem solved in steel and cement. Civil engineers are trained to think this way too. We measure soil bearing capacity, calculate traffic loads, and design curves for safe speeds. Numbers feel objective. Yet every blueprint is a quiet declaration of who matters in a city and who does not.
When a city administration decides to build a massive elevated corridor through a bustling neighborhood, the justification is always efficiency. The goal is to save ten minutes for the thousands of commuters driving from one end of town to the other. That sounds like a fair goal.
In philosophy, this is classic utilitarianism, which seeks the greatest good for the greatest number of people. If ten thousand drivers save time, the project is declared a triumph of modern planning.
However, step beneath the shadow of that same flyover and the math looks very different. For the people living and working on the ground, a neighborhood has been sliced in two.
The local grocer loses customers because crossing the road now requires climbing a steep footbridge. Elderly residents stay indoors because the footpaths were shaved away to add an extra lane for cars. The space under the concrete pillars becomes dark, dusty, and forgotten.
In saving ten minutes for the person inside an air-conditioned car, the design steals the daily comfort and safety of the person walking on the street.
The American thinker Langdon Winner once argued that physical structures have politics built right into them. You do not need to pass an unfair law to exclude people when a missing sidewalk or a high divider does the job silently.
When we design streets solely to move vehicles as fast as possible, we are making a value judgment. We are saying that speed is more important than community, and that the citizen who owns a car deserves more public space than the citizen who walks or cycles.
A truly fair city requires a different kind of philosophy, one rooted in justice rather than raw speed. The philosopher John Rawls suggested that a fair society is one you would gladly enter even if you did not know whether you would end up rich or poor. Applied to civil engineering, the test is simple.
Would you approve a city master plan if you did not know whether you would be the person driving over the flyover or the vendor trying to push a cart underneath it?
The writer is a consultant to Rashtriya Raksha University, a short story writer, columnist and contemporary affairs commentator; Views presented are personal.