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 Daily Independent Online.
* Friday, August 13, 2004.
LAMATA to build strong transport system
in Lagos
By Stella Odueme
Reporter, Lagos.
Road users in Lagos State may
soon have cause to smile if the Lagos Metropolis Area Transports
Authority (LAMATA) makes true its promise to create public transportation
that is well focused.
Speaking with Daily
Independent in Lagos, the Managing Director of LAMATA, Dr Dayo
Mobereola said that his agency was applying a holistic and an integrated
mass transport approach to improve transportation system in the state.
According to him, prior to now, the agency had adopted
many methods to solve the problem of traffic congestion and had found out
that the only way out was to create an enabling environment by bringing
together the various modes of public transportation within the state to
make them more effective.
Mobereola who said that his
agency has been successful in this direction, added that it had started
tackling the problem from existing assets which are the roads network
across the state.
Adding that his agency had
identified the road network in the state, which are about 640 kilometers,
he said the agency would ensure their maintenance so that they would be
motor able for public road users. This way, traffic congestion would be
reduced, he said.
Mobereola said that LAMATA was
also looking at creating mass transportation system, which would involve
the reconstruction of the bus axis operating in the state metropolis.
While emphasizing the need for
innovation in the transport sector, he said that his agency cannot ignore
already existing mode of transport, but there was need to make them more
productive.
To make them more productive,
the agency intended to get them organized by forming association so that
they could be responsive to LAMATA’s directives and road users needs and
lamented the situation of public transport in the state, which is
disorganized and ineffective.
According to him, associations within the sector are
loose and ineffective hence the need to organize them into associations,
corporatives or companies so that there could be collective means of
operations.
This would pave the way for
the new Mass Transportation system which is Bus Transit Transport, a
system that would operate like the metro line which is expected to be
effective and affordable. He
argued that road users would still pay the same fares or even cheaper
rates to get to their destinations at a faster rate because the buses
would run on designated routes where there would be no competition with private
operators. He explained that the idea was to encourage the present
transport operators to move into this new transport system. Hence “we
want to encourage them and provide the capacity that will allow them to
operate the new system” he said,.
To ensure that system did not
fail, Mobereola said that those already in the business of transportation
who were yearning for transformation would be used since they had an idea
of how to run and manage public buses than bring in new set of people
into system.
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