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| Example of Lagos gridlock - Apongbon Street traffic |
At least three of every
10 years spent in Lagos is lost to traffic, a survey by a Lagos-based transport
firm, Planet Projects, has shown.
The
Punch report continues:
It,
therefore, means that residents of Lagos, Nigeria’s economic capital, spend an
average of seven hours 20 minutes in traffic every day.
The
Managing Director, Planet Projects, Mr. Biodun Otunola, who spoke on the issue
at a press briefing in Lagos on Saturday, said 70 per cent of the city’s
traffic bottlenecks could be located on road junctions.
He
said this was taking a heavy toll on the health of the road users, reducing
their lifespan and adversely affecting their productivity as well as the
economy of the nation.
“Driving
to work daily and being stuck in traffic for hours causes fatigue, leads to low
productivity and burning of fuel. Unless we solve the traffic problem, and by
extension the transport problem, we’ll continue to kill ourselves,” he said.
Otunola,
whose firm is organizing a three-day conference on the challenges and
opportunities in the Nigerian railway from today (Monday), said there was an
urgent need to reduce car ridership in Lagos by 20 per cent.
For
instance, he said the Lekki-Epe Expressway, which was initially designed to
move an average of 7,000 vehicles, now had to contend with about 70,000
automobiles.
He
also stressed that there was no need to build new roads in Lagos, adding that
what was required was to work on the existing ones, remove some junctions and
focus on effective public transportation.
According
to him, economic development and improvement in standard of living may not be
achieved unless necessary steps are taken to tackle the challenges in the
transportation sector.
Disclosing that the firm had concluded plans to host an international conference on railway themed: ‘Nigeria railway industry moving from 19th to 21st Century: Challenges and opportunities’, he said it would address key issues in the industry.
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