Despite all legacy projects and ambitious road infrastructure, traffic management, a key component of the first pillar of the THEMES+ agenda of the Sanwo-Olu administration, remains a huge challenge, writes ADEYINKA ADERIBIGBE
Traffic congestion is common in metropolitan Lagos, where vehicles, pedestrians and public transport co-share the road in a complex and frustrating web. Several factors, including high population density, inadequate and bad road infrastructure, limited transport alternatives and sprawling urban slums, all contribute to traffic congestion.
However, transportation experts state that traffic congestion leaves far-reaching effects beyond mere inconveniences. Usually, traffic congestion has far-reaching health, economic and environmental effects, and prolonged exposure to it could have wider physical and mental health implications.
Though successive administrations had not been helpless, solutions have just been inadequate to tame the hydra-headed monster that now attends to the “good problems” that her bustling population has now turned almost every part of the state into an urban slum for the absence of transportation alternatives.
From the Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu era, when the state hit the 10 million headcount (thereby becoming a megacity), to the Babajide Sanwo-Olu administration which inherited a 23 million population, the challenge of traffic management has never been less daunting.
Besides being just a state with a heavy population of 10 per cent of the nation’s population, Lagos is Nigeria’s economic and commercial capital and Africa’s fifth biggest economy. It is home to the busiest air and sea ports. Despite being the state with the smallest land size, it accounts for 400 vehicles per kilometre of road, in a country where the national average is 30 vehicles per kilometre.
All of these indicators point to the fact that the state’s roads would be burdened for a long time except more transit modes are provided and public transport alternatives become more valued.
Traffic congestion is a condition of transportation that is characterized by slow speed, longer trips, longer time and increased vehicular queuing. Since the 1950s when Lagos began to witness a shift in travel patterns, traffic congestion on urban road networks has gradually increased alongside transit demand even as the interactions between vehicles and pedestrians using the road as shared assets resulted in congestion.
According to the Nubeo Traffic Time Index’s latest rating, a platform that delivers real-time information on traffic index (including commute time, CO2 emissions overall traffic system inefficiencies and other ways of life), Lagos, leads five other African cities with the worst traffic congestion rating. Lagos leads other cities such as Nairobi (Kenya), Cairo (Egypt), Pretoria (South Africa), and Cape Town (South Africa).
While Lagos’ traffic index stands at 342.5 and a time index of 67.4, Nairobi has a traffic index of 253.6 and a time index of 53.4, and Cairo records 244.5 in traffic index and 50.2 time index. Pretoria and Cape Town, two South African cities captured in the Nubeo report had 230.5 and 45.5 and 208.9 and 42.5 on traffic index and time index respectively.
Painting the picture more graphically, renowned transportation expert Patrick Adenusi described Lagos traffic as “simply maddening,” and one which the government would do well to address frontally if the state must return to the path of efficiency and real growth.
In a simple calculation sent to The Nation, Adenusi said in terms of man-hour loss: “If you are in traffic for four hours daily, in five days, you would have spent 20 hours a week and 1,044 hours a year. That is 43.5 days or one and a half months, just idling behind your steering wheel. Imagine the cost of the man-hour loss in terms of fuel. For the cost, Adenusi said you spend N610. If a thousand vehicles are caught in avoidable traffic daily, that is N610,000 in five days it is N3 million, while in 20 working days, it costs N12.2 million. In a year, that is N146.4 million wasted on just an extra litre of fuel bought for being in traffic. The figure becomes more staggering, he said, if the cost of carbon emission, noise pollution, engine wear and tear, delayed and undelivered goods and services and shocks and stresses on the citizens are imputed monthly.
“If a million people are caught in four-hour traffic daily, that is a combined 43,500,000 days a year.”
For him, the only legacy Sanwo-Olu could leave for Lagosians is to resolve what he called “the deliberately created traffic congestion, by diagnosing the root causes to solve them and make changes.
A former dean of the School of Transportation and Logistics at the Lagos State University (LASU-SOTL), Prof. Samuel Odewunmi, partly agreed with Adenusi that traffic in the state is “deliberately created.” He cited instances where the government would block major arterial roads just because of major construction or minor rehabilitation, citing instances of the Lagos-Badagry Expressway along which route LASU is, which has been under one form of construction or the other in the last two and half decades.
He said that quickly fixing roads and opening up alternative roads where much-delayed work is anticipated, would bring relief to motorists and traffic congestion recorded on the roads would be reduced.
The Special Adviser to the Governor on Transportation Mr Sola Giwa would however highlight attitudinal challenges of motorists and road users as another major trigger of road congestion.
Addressing a stakeholders’ forum made up of Events Centre owners recently, Giwa painted a scenario of a traffic pattern that could attend a small impediment, even for as low as five minutes. Any brief period spent patronizing roadside hawkers by motorists leaves a spillover effect that might take no less than four to five hours of hard work by LASTMA officials to clean up.
“Because you have an average of 400 vehicles per kilometre of road in metropolitan Lagos, any breach of traffic flow leaves a backlog of traffic congestion. Anytime you are held in traffic, and you are wondering why, or perhaps, you went through the hours only to discover nothing that could have impeded traffic flow, just know that somebody just caused it by buying something on the go.”
Giwa may not be wrong. Statistics have shown that for every three minutes of traffic glitch, the road gets messy for an hour or two and could be longer, should there be other factors impeding traffic.
But there could be other causative factors. Planet Project Managing Director, Mr Abiodun Otunola identified pedestrian interferences as another major impediment to smooth traffic flow in metropolitan Lagos. Otunola, who has been involved in many road improvement initiatives by Lagos State said one fundamental flaw of Nigeria’s road construction was that it was built for the motorists only in mind. “Because of the lack of access, other road users – pedestrians, cyclists, bikers, even PLDs, get on to the roads and their interference usually causes traffic flow”.
This is not discounting the ubiquitous bad roads that are almost everywhere. The poor state of roads, he said could also be a major cause as traffic has been proved to improve significantly anywhere the government just carried out road repair, thereby improving journey time and travel experience of both motorists, commuters and other road users.
James Adeleke, a civil servant, working in Alausa, the state secretariat, however, added to the list of factors causing traffic congestion in the state.
According to him, apart from bad roads, the improper habit of commercial bus operators is a major factor. Many of them have scant regard for designated public spaces and just park and pick commuters at their whims. Most of the time, traffic ensues when commercial drivers just park anywhere they like just to pick up passengers and they might be stationed there for some minutes just soliciting patronage. He cited instances at the inward and outward Berger Bus Stop, on the entrance into Lagos and at the Secretariat Bus Stop, among other places. For him, strict enforcement could help to drive sanity down the throats of operators who must be punished for adding to the woes of the commuting public.
Mrs Romoke Adeyemo said she has observed some sanity since the KAI Brigade (men of the Lagos State Sanitation Corps), started arresting those dashing across the expressways, especially at locations where you have pedestrian bridges. Insisting that this also contributes to traffic snarls around the city-state, the middle-aged woman, a fashion designer at Fadeyi said buses stop anywhere they see a pool of commuters, not minding it is not designated as a bus stop by the state.
Usman Aliyu, a transportation expert said the bus stops at the desk of the state government to demonstrate the will to do what is needed to arrest traffic congestion by arresting all that contributes to it.
Aliyu said though the government had since 2002 done well by establishing the Lagos State Traffic Management Agency, the agency, he lamented had morphed from being charged with managing traffic in the bustling metropolis to a strictly revenue-generating one, where attention is more at watching out only for infractions for the benefit of generating fines for the government rather than managing traffic and educating innocent motorists.
Aliyu, who runs a consulting outfit in Lagos Island said the government must continue to play its roles if the task of ensuring a reduction in traffic congestion is to be achieved.
Though the government has been introducing more alternatives to the roads, Aliyu contends that the road mode would continue to play a major role and absorb between 70% and 80% of travel modes despite the injection of new alternatives like water buses and rail cars (the blue and red lines), thereby underscoring the reason the government must continue to work on deepening its share of public transportation by improving acceptability of public transportation modes and year-round rehabilitation of bad road portions to improve traveller’s experience.
Various studies by Wikipedia, the online research resource behemoth, indicated that traffic congestion is better handled not only by redistributing traffic via the injection of more alternative modes of transportation but also by addressing it holistically by managing the supply and demand end.
Congestion, Wikipedia further added, can be reduced by either increasing road capacity (supply) or by reducing traffic (demand). Capacity can be increased in several ways, but needs to take into account latent demand otherwise it may be used more wrongly than anticipated. Critics of the approach of adding capacity have compared it to “fighting obesity by letting out your belt” (inducing demand that did not exist before). For example, when new lanes are created, households with a second car that used to be parked most of the time may begin to use the second car for commuting. Reducing road capacity has in turn been attacked as removing free choice as well as increasing travel costs and times, placing an especially high burden on the low-income residents who must commute to work.
Increased supply can include Adding more capacity at bottlenecks (such as by adding more lanes at the expense of hard shoulders or safety zones, removing local obstacles like bridge supports, or adding more capacity by adding more lanes.
Reduction of demand on the other hand can include parking restrictions, making motor vehicle use less attractive by increasing the monetary and non-monetary costs of parking or introducing greater competition for limited city or road space. Most transport planning experts agree that free parking distorts the market in favour of car travel, thereby increasing congestion.
Park-and-ride facilities, parking at a distance and allowing continuation by public transport or ride-sharing are other ways to reduce traffic congestion.
Park-and-ride car parks are commonly found at metro stations, freeway entrances in suburban areas and at the edge of smaller cities.
Reduction of road capacity to force traffic onto other travel modes can also serve as a means of reducing gridlock. Methods include traffic calming and the shared space concept.
It is argued that as the government adopts more of these, it should be able to achieve a significant reduction in traffic congestion and bring more respite to the people who daily commute on the roads, bringing smiles, rather than sadness to their faces anytime they think of jumping on the road to prosecute the most minutest of reasons why they must use the road.
