It was supposed to be Chennai’s Times Square. When city planners proposed a pedestrian plaza along Pondy Bazaar in T Nagar, they envisioned a wide, people-first corridor through the city’s most frenetic shopping district. The concept took years: a 2013 design, trial runs in 2016, and a grand inauguration by former chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami on Nov 13, 2019. On that evening, with fairy lights strung across trees and music filling the street, it felt, briefly, like a different city.The price tag matched the ambition. Built under the Centre’s Smart City Mission at ₹39.86 crore — with an additional ₹19.11 crore spent on redesigning 23 surrounding streets — the nearly 1km stretch from Thanikachalam Road Signal to Pondy Bazaar Police Station was fitted with seating areas, landscaped green zones, children’s play equipment, and smart poles with surveillance cameras. Five battery-operated shuttle carts ferried elderly shoppers for free; cycle-sharing stands enabled last-mile connectivity; police patrolled on segways.Nearly seven years have passed. The city and its administrators have spent the time dismantling what they built.Shopkeepers pushed display stands onto the elevated platform, and vendors staked out corners, together eating up half the plaza in several stretches. The result is not mere inconvenience. “I fractured my ankle here last week,” said R Narasimhan, 59. “I was trying to dodge someone demanding money, walking between encroachments, when a two-wheeler tried to pass. I tripped and fell,” he said, pointing to the bulky white cast on his right leg.Each element of his account points to a distinct hazard that now defines daily life on the plaza. Transgender individuals, children, and some adults solicit money from pedestrians, cornering them at the narrowest points where there is little room to manoeuvre. The platform itself is uneven in stretches — people risk tripping while navigating encroachments on either side.Threading through all this are two-wheelers, treating the footpath as a convenient bypass for the gridlock on the road. Among them are police — the force once tasked with patrolling the plaza, now among its most visible violators.The road has fared no better. “The plaza came with a simple idea — give pedestrians a proper walkway and discipline traffic on the one-way road. It should have worked. Instead, it is chaos from morning to night,” said Savitha Menon, a schoolteacher. “Vehicles are parked on both sides — not just at the kerb. We miss buses sometimes as even the stops are blocked by parked vehicles,” she said, her seven-year-old daughter struggling beside her with a heavy backpack.The smart poles — fitted with cameras and emergency features meant to give pedestrians, especially women, a sense of security — are now effectively inaccessible. Encroachers have settled around their bases. Whether the cameras are functioning or whether anyone is watching is anyone’s guess. “No one uses it anyway. If I move my shop away from here, I will end up blocking the road,” said a fruit vendor.The public bicycles — part of a city-wide cycle-sharing scheme that briefly promised a cleaner commute — have quietly disappeared from T Nagar, as they have from much of Chennai. The children’s play equipment that once made the space feel like a civic square — the monkey bars, the see-saws — are gone, broken, or absorbed into the surrounding clutter. The battery-operated shuttle carts that ferried elderly shoppers free of charge have vanished without a trace. The benches where the weary could rest have gone too.The pedestrian plaza still exists, technically. The platform is there. The smart poles stand. But the city it was designed for — orderly, safe, walkable — lives only in the proposal documents, somewhere in a govt archive. For the people who come here every day, ₹40 crore bought them less than a decade of a dream.BOXWhat will it take to get the plaza back?TOI asked residents and vendors what can be done to restore the pedestrian plazaEnforcementA permanent beat team for the plaza, not rotating policemen passing throughOne team named and held accountable for its upkeepParkingTow, fine, don’t warn — vehicles blocking bus stops should be removed on sightMultilevel parking must be put to max useMake roadside parking premium to discourage parkingEncroachmentMark vendor zones. Evict or relocate unregistered vendorsClear encroachment around smart polesInfrastructureRepair uneven platform surface before it claims another ankleRestore benches, play equipment and cycle standsMonthly CCTV uptime reports made public for every smart poleAccountabilityA monthly audit involving residents, shopkeepers and commutersMaintenance targets published — and tracked
