Seventy-seven out of every hundred residents of Lima walk daily to get to work or school. It's the most widely used way of getting around the city — more than the car, more than public transport. And yet Lima keeps being built as though the pedestrian were an afterthought, a detail sorted out once everything else has already been decided. That contradiction — the majority walks, but the city is designed for those who drive — is perhaps the deepest urban tension we still have to resolve.
The sidewalk, the most forgotten public space
The sidewalk is, in essence, the most democratic public space there is: no admission fee, no need to book a court, just step outside. And yet it's also the most neglected. Data from the Ministry of Transport and Communications shows that more than two-thirds of the sidewalks assessed in Lima have discontinuities greater than two centimeters — an obstacle that, for anyone with reduced mobility, pushing a stroller, or simply in a hurry, becomes a real barrier, not a symbolic one.
In some areas, the problem isn't a broken sidewalk — it's the absence of one. In parts of San Juan de Lurigancho, for example, entire neighborhoods went for years without complete streets and sidewalks, forcing thousands of people to walk along the same road shared with cars. This is not a minor infrastructure detail: it's an urban inequality with direct consequences for the safety of those with the least room to absorb that risk.
The human cost of a city designed for the car
The numbers leave no room for ambiguity. In 2024, a third of the people who died in traffic incidents in Lima were pedestrians. The Ombudsman's Office found that the lack of safe crossings and adequate signage explains the vast majority of those cases. This isn't purely a matter of individual behavior — careless pedestrians or distracted drivers alone: it's a matter of urban design that has systematically failed to prioritize the safety of those on foot.
A city that doesn't protect those who walk doesn't protect its own majority. Designing for the pedestrian isn't a symbolic gesture: it's designing for how people actually move.
Signs that change is possible
There are genuine reasons to look ahead here too. Pedestrianization projects carried out in Lima's historic center between 2021 and 2023 proved something compelling: every kilometer of street redesigned reduced public transport travel time by 14%. That's not just a benefit for pedestrians; it's a benefit for the entire mobility chain of the city, including those who get around by bus or combi.
The superblock model — where through-traffic is redirected to perimeter roads and the interior of the block is returned to pedestrians — has been gaining ground in cities around the world, and is now starting to be discussed in local urban planning too. It's not an unreachable European utopia: it's a design decision that any municipality can begin to apply, street by street, without waiting for a total transformation of the city.
The role of every project in this transformation
Every building erected in the city has the chance to either support this cause or ignore it. A setback that respects the minimum sidewalk width, a façade that doesn't encroach on pedestrian space with poorly resolved vehicle ramps, trees that provide shade in a city where the summer sun punishes those on foot without mercy — these are small decisions that, added together, determine whether Lima remains a city that merely tolerates pedestrians or finally becomes one that prioritizes them. Those of us who walk this city every day — which is nearly all of us — deserve urban design that stops treating us as the exception and starts treating us, rightly, as the majority we truly are.
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