Walking Delhi with FOG

Delhi is flat, enormous, and made of several street patterns that have nothing to do with each other. That makes it one of the more interesting maps to uncover on foot.

Delhi is several cities to walk

Delhi does not walk like one place. Old Delhi, the walled town of Shahjahanabad, is a knot of lanes behind Chandni Chowk, and Chawri Bazar and Khari Baoli run off into alleys too narrow for a car. New Delhi is the opposite. Lutyens laid out roundabouts and long avenues, and Connaught Place is a set of concentric circles you can trace like a target. South of that the colonies take over, Lodhi Colony, Defence Colony, Hauz Khas, Green Park, each a self contained block of numbered lanes. The ground is flat except for the Ridge. What ends a walk here is rarely the terrain. It is a flyover with no crossing, or a footpath that stops without warning and hands you to the traffic.

One good afternoon

Start at Lodhi Gardens and walk the paths past the tombs, then leave by the Max Mueller Marg side and cut through Khan Market. Head east to India Gate and turn along Kartavya Path toward Rashtrapati Bhavan. That is roughly six kilometres on real pavement with trees over most of it, and it draws a clean line across the middle of the map.

Do Old Delhi on a separate day. Red Fort, the length of Chandni Chowk, down past Jama Masjid, then into the lanes toward Chawri Bazar. It looks like two kilometres. It takes an afternoon, and it will light up more small streets than the entire Lutyens walk did.

Why the percentage moves slowly

Delhi covers close to 1,500 square kilometres. You are not going to finish it. That is worth knowing before you start, because the number next to the city name will move in fractions for a long time.

The compensation is that the shapes are good. The Connaught Place circles come out as rings. The Lutyens roundabouts become a web of spokes. Old Delhi fills as a dense scribble that no other part of the city resembles. If you walk the same colony market and the same park loop every week you will see a bright island form quickly, and then you can push outward from it street by street.

The walking calendar

Delhi has roughly two good stretches. October into early November before the air turns, and mid February through March. Peak summer runs past 45C and the middle of the day is unusable, so walks move to first light. The monsoon from July into September floods underpasses and makes long routes unpredictable. Winter brings smog, and on the worst days the sensible move is to stay in.

In practice that means Delhi rewards short frequent walks over big single efforts. Half an hour before work, most days, covers more ground across a year than three ambitious weekend routes.

What FOG records

The whole world starts hidden under fog. Every street you physically walk is revealed and stays revealed. It works for walking, running and riding, and background exploring keeps it going with the app closed and the screen off, so the phone can stay in your pocket on the walk to the metro.

There is no account and no sign-up. Nothing is uploaded, there is no cloud, no analytics, no ads and no tracking. The map never leaves your phone, and you can export your own data. FOG is free to explore. One purchase of USD 5.99 unlocks unlimited ranks, every character and history import, with no subscription.

Questions people actually ask

Start with a dark map.

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