While vehicular traffic in the city has been disrupted due to the perennial pothole-problem and the haphazard Metro construction work, pedestrians using the city's bridges are not having it any easy either. There are a total of 344 bridges—including foot over-bridges and road over-bridges—and 24 skywalks in the city. But, of these, 176 are currently undergoing repairs, with 61 having major work going on, and 29 of them being reconstructed. This has left pedestrians with 192 bridges to use. Incidentally, while the audit of these bridges began in 2016, the BMC only started repair work on a war-footing after the Himalaya FOB collapsed in CST in March this year, killing 7. Nine months earlier, in July 2018, Gokhale bridge in Andheri partially collapsed, resulting in two deaths.

The spate of incidents led the BMC to re-inspect all the bridges again. CV Kand Consultants was asked to conduct a fresh audit in the western suburbs, while Structwel Designers & Consultants Pvt. Ltd was handed over the task of looking at bridges in the eastern suburbs. DD Desai was allotted bridges in the island city.
The country's richest municipal corporation may not have an issue with dispensing money for repair work, but streamlining a mammoth task like this one, has its own challenges. For starters, the BMC needs permissions from the traffic police, and other agencies, including the Railways, to ensure other amenities remain unaffected. The next issue is of rehabilitating occupants, either legal or illegal, under the bridges.