“With a little bit of planning, you can do a lot of things.”
Akshali Gandhi (’12) has been putting those words into practice since her first days as a Cyclone. A George Washington Carver Scholar from Naperville, Illinois, Gandhi double majored in community and regional planning and international studies. She also managed to complete two semesters abroad in New Zealand and Turkey, which sparked her interest in urban planning issues on a global level.
After earning her Master of Regional Planning from Cornell University, Gandhi worked as a transportation planner in several cities, most recently in Seattle, Washington.
“As a transportation planner, I’ve always been interested in examining the street as public space,” Gandhi says. “During COVID, I saw how cities around the world were redesigning streets to be more pedestrian and people friendly.”
Last year, Gandhi received the prestigious Fulbright Nehru Research grant to study street design and road safety in Pune, India. Knowing that traffic fatalities are a leading cause of death among young people in India, Gandhi sought to research the role street design and public space interventions play in road safety for infants, children, and caregivers.
“The idea is that if you make things safer and more enjoyable for the most vulnerable users, then it automatically becomes a better experience for all people,” she says.
Over the next eight months, she supported the Institute for Transportation Development and Policy India (ITDP India) to conduct a biking and walking assessment, and partnered with Urban95 and the Global Designing Cities Initiative (GDCI) to plan a tactical urbanism intervention for two school zones.
Describing the experience as gratifying, she says one highlight was when she was able to go for a ride on newly implemented bike infrastructure and attend the inauguration of a redesigned school zone and children’s plaza.
Part of her grant also gave her funding to learn Marathi, the local language in Pune. Having stronger language skills helped Gandhi not only to navigate daily life in India, but also to reconnect with her heritage as an Indian American.
Now back in Seattle, she hopes to leverage her Fulbright experience in pursuit of a more internationally oriented career in road safety and transportation planning.
“The way we plan our streets needs to be reflective of the people using it,” she says. “I hope that I can spend my career advocating for safer, more sustainable, and livelier cities.”