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Commuting between Lagos’s central business district on the island and the city’s mainland remains a lot more onerous than it should. Long delays on the Third-Mainland Bridge during peak periods – or what Lagosians routinely refer to as the rush hours – is both time and energy-consuming. It’s a significant productivity drain on the city with its strategic economic role. Slow mobility ranks alongside power shortage as a key structural constraint to Lagos’s competitiveness. Implementing creative ideas to optimize existing transport infrastructure will help. On the bridge especially, it can help to unblock what is arguably the most important transportation artery in Nigeria’s commercial capital.
This will bring relief to motorists even as city planners work on devising more long-term solutions. As the urban conglomeration that accounts for a full quarter of Nigeria’s economic output – and Africa’s first genuine contender for the status of a megacity – Lagos must think boldly and tweak more at the edges. Otherwise its longer-term sustainability and bid to consolidate as Nigeria’s economic engine will hang precipitously in the balance. A dysfunctional transport system with worsening mobility will carry knock-on effects, likely hobbling Nigeria’s potential to drive integration and prosperity.
Tasking commute
A system of scheduled lanes switches on the Third-Mainland Bridge will help to expand capacity for travellers to Lagos’s islands in the mornings and commuters bound for the mainland in the afternoon. What follows therefore is a very specific proposal for lane optimisation on the bridge which could provide significant capacity expansion to accommodate its bustling vehicular traffic. This author draws on his own anecdotal experience of early morning commutes on the bridge from the island-side in Ikoyi to Ikeja on the mainland, a route he plies about four to six times each month.
From about 4am to 8am on working days, island-bound commuters using the bridge contend with steady traffic build-up which slows to a crawl at around 7am. During the afternoon peak hours, usually from 4pm to 8pm, the direction of the pile-up is reversed. Workers leaving the island for their abodes on the mainland contend with hours-long traffic delay.On Wednesday 18th April this author entered the bridge from the Ikoyi/Osborne estate ramp as early as 7am. It soon became apparent that vehicular traffic towards the island was already backed up for kilometres.
Whilst traffic towards the island extended unbroken to the Oworonshoki mainland end of the bridge, one would struggle to count 30 vehicles plying the entire four lanes in the mainland direction. This was the observation for the 10minutes or so needed to traverse the 11.8km length to Oworonshoki. Perhaps this asymmetry between both traffic directions is not always so wide but it is the dominant morning pattern which is reversed in the afternoon as workers head home from the island. Which raises the question: why aren’t we experimenting with a system that dynamically relieves pressure on commuters in peak traffic through the use of excess lane capacity on the one side?
Re-shuffle to relieve
The whole Third-Mainland Bridge needs creative rethinking. Since the bridge consists of four commuter lanes in each direction, there is a strong case for optimising the lanes during peak through co-opting two proximate lanes from the opposite side to supplement in the congested direction. This solution will see a dynamic optimisation of the 4+4 lanesby switching it to 6+2 system when needed. It essentiallyrequires reversing the normal flow of two lanes on the other side (those closest to the congested side of the bridge). Some traffic can thus be diverted to the other side to supplement capacity. This should relief choked-up traffic with two makeshift extra capacity lanes being deployed to form six lanes (as opposed to the present four) in peak traffic periods.
Piloting this scheduled lane shifts during peak periods promises an exciting template that could be applied elsewhere in the city. Undoubtedly, the two lanes left on the lighter traffic side will be sufficient for travellers heading in thatdirection. The process should operate only on work days (Monday to Friday) with a coordinated arrangement in place to smoothly reverse theflow: six lane will convey traffic towards the island from 7am-10am and six lanes will be open to vehicular flow towards the mainland from 4pm to 8pm.
Emulate trend setters
The importance of good proactive management of a dynamically switching lane systems along major commuter arteries cannot be over-emphasised. The devil is in the detail. Many world cities already implement similar approaches based on capacity expansion and constriction in each direction as needed. That has kept commuter cities from Cape Town through Los Angeles to Tokyo ticking through peak traffic hours. Since the openingof the Third-Mainland Bridge in the 1980s, the rapid expansion in the number of vehicles has not seen a corresponding expansion of road infrastructure. Under-capacity of the bridge relative to vehicularnumbers is therefore one consequence.
Other measures such as prohibiting some vehicles from plying congested routes on specific days or during some hours are certainly more draconian than the capacity switch innovation that is being proposed here. Lane switching can alleviate the perennial hardship faced by motorists pending the actualisation of Lagos’s plan to build a 38km-length Fourth-Mainland Bridge. However, at the core of getting this right – like every public administration issue in Nigeria – will be good governance of the system. This will require advance publicity, effective commuter education, adequate signage along the entire route, redesign of exit lanes and all other such measures required to create a well-functioning, dynamic and easily understood traffic optimisation system on the Third Mainland Bridge.
Piloting this system could allow for another big transformation in Lagos’s traffic management: the creation of a small but uniformed corps to monitoring motorist’s adherence to the temporary lane partition system. This will help deter some of the notorious habits that slow down traffic on the bridge, especially the hundreds of slow-moving vehicles that stay in the fast lanes and thereby obstruct faster moving vehicles. Poor education of motorists over the years and a general lack of awareness of the drawbacks has led to “lane-hugging” contributing probably as much as 30% of the traffic build-up, with the increasing vehicular entry onto the bridge inevitably slowing down finally to a crawl. This bridge corps will also be needed to oversee a robustly implemented network of temporary cones placed at one 1 meter intervals to partition the two directions of travel. The cones will come into place an hour before the start of the lane expansion system at peak-periods in either direction.
A bridge safety corps
Whilst the bridge is a federal road, piloting a state traffic monitoring corps there could help lay the foundation of a dedicated bridge and highway corps. It can gradually grow into a specially-trained unit with the broader Lagos State Transport Management Agency (LASTMA).Diligent planning and a smooth roll-out will be important to maximise benefits and mitigate potential risks in the system. A careful spatial re-design at specific points is needed to facilitate entry and exit onto the convertible two lanes on the proximate side of peak traffic. This redesign requires some investment but the likely gains for commuters will justify such an expenditure.
Even as the fine point in the design and implementation are carefully worked through, extensive precautionary measures will need to be in place to guarantee safety and achieve the intended goal. First, clear signage should be erected well in advance. The bridge corps officers must also be stationed at the entry and exit to the makeshift lanes. They will display information on placards reminding motorists of possible exits if using the two extra lanes.
Second, core components of the system should be carefully piloted before the actual roll-out. One possibility is to dedicate the two extra lanes during the mornings to only those motorists exiting at the Osborne and other ramps further into the island. Another option is to allocate one of the makeshift lanes for the exclusive use of commercial passenger vehicles, which is probably viable given the general shift to longer routing with fewer stops by commercial passenger vehicles.
Third, Lagos is notorious for large numbers of motorists (particularly the commercial operators) who ignore road signs and thereby routinely endanger the safety of other road users. Oversight systems and physical barriers will therefore be needed to compel all drivers, for example those needing to exit the bridge earlier at points such as the Oyingbo/Adekunle ramp, to opt for the normal four lanes from their point of entry onto the bridge. Without doubt, continuing public education and clear and adequate signage throughout the route will help to guarantee public trust and buy-in for this dynamic lanes system.
In the longer term, solutions focused on spatial reordering in Lagos will complement short-term tinkering of traffic lanes between the island and the mainland. In particular, creating safe and well maintained business clusters and parks in strategic axes on the mainland will help to reduce workers’ commute through congested traffic. But even as planners find such re-design and structural solutions, there are clear and immediate efficiency benefits to be derived from switching the existing bridge lanes to decongest peak hour traffic.
Ola Oladiran Bello
Dr Bello holds MPhil and PhD degrees from the University of Cambridge and is the Executive Director of Good Governance Africa (GGA).
