Moving People
Lagos, welcome to efficient transportation
I spent the best part of 3 decades of my life growing up in Nigeria and one effect that has on you is you tend not to notice extremely odd things that have been normalised. One of those is just how inefficient transportation is, and has always been, in Nigeria. Now that I’m only a visitor to Nigeria, albeit a fairly regular one, I try to pay attention to those weird things as often as I can.
Let me digress but only a little. About 5 years ago I spent about 10 days between Bangkok, Thailand and Hanoi, Vietnam. I wasn’t prepared for how stark the difference was between two bustling cities less than 2 hours flying time apart. In simple terms, Bangkok had a metro system and Hanoi did not. So while we moved around on trains in Bangkok (we only rode a tuktuk for fun), we landed in Hanoi and were confronted by what looked like millions of scooters and a mass of people moving about in a manner that would have been hard to describe as organised.
Seeing so many people obviously dressed for work and riding on scooters reminded me of Nigeria. In a city of millions of people, the most inefficient way of moving people around is using two wheels. At most you can you can get 2 or 3 people on each one which means you end up with hundreds of thousands of them weaving through traffic and trying to one-up each other in the process. It is dangerous and terribly unsightly.
Thankfully, exactly 3 years after I visited, the Hanoi Metro began operating and has been growing quite rapidly since then:
The Cat Linh – Ha Dong metro line served more than 2.65 million passengers in the first quarter of this year, skyrocketing 262% year-on-year, according to General Director of Hanoi Railway Company Limited (Hanoi Metro) Vu Hong Truong.
Currently there are 10,000 commuters using monthly passes. On overage, the route transports over 32,000 passengers per weekday, and around 28,000 riders during a weekend.[…]
Trains run every 10 minutes with a capacity of 960 passengers each
The emphasis above is mine. How many motorcycles would it take to move 1,000 people from point A to B every 10 minutes? Or how many 14 seater buses like the eyesores that cover Lagos in the name of public transportation?
On Monday September 4, the first metro line in Lagos began operating:
Paying passengers have used the Lagos metro rail service for the first time on Monday, 20 years after plans for the line were announced and 14 years after construction began on the project.
Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu was on board as the train began commercial operations months after it was launched at the beginning of the year with test rides.
The 13km (eight mile-) Blue Line from Marina on Lagos Island to Mile 2 on the mainland, links the business districts with the residential areas.
The train is expected to ease commuting in the state which has been notorious for its traffic jams.
Estimates say the new rail line will cut down the length of journeys on that route by as much as three hours - though commuting times on the roads have been reduced drastically since the removal of a fuel subsidy has seen fewer cars on the roads.
There are five stations on the overland route which can be covered in around 30 minutes and it will cost 750 naira ($1; £0.80) for a full trip.
There will be an initial 12 trips during the morning and evening peak hours which will rise to 76 at full operation.
To say this is long overdue will be a gross understatement. But finally, it is now theoretically possible to move large amounts of people across the state on a daily basis. There was simply no way to do that before and no Nigerian who was born in Lagos and has grown up there has seen this level of efficiency in moving people.
It’s important not to get too carried away. Lagos is a deeply corrupt place and it is possible for them to find a way to screw this up. There are small details that will need to be sorted out for this to work properly - why are the trains stopping for 90 seconds at each station, for instance? The Abuja Metro is a warning that nothing should be taken for granted.
But this should work. The suppressed demand is all there and now - with the removal of fuel subsidies and painful inflation - is the perfect time to have a mass transit system which makes it possible to spread out any increases in costs over a much broader base (i.e. more people).
If it works well, it means Lagos would have to figure out how to do complex things and domesticate the knowledge. It is another striking thing about Nigeria how there is very little complexity, relative to many non-African peer countries, going on. To get a metro system to work requires a complex interaction of electricity, engineering and everything else. Getting all this to work to the point where a scheduled train service becomes a normal part of life in Lagos will be an underrated transformation in Lagos life.
I look forward to riding on it.