Okada Ban: LCCI Seeks Lagos Traffic Law Review
GILBERT EKUGBE
The ban on motorcycles and tricycles which took effect Saturday would have a profound social, economic and political costs according to the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI).
The Director-General, LCCI, Muda Yusuf, in a statement said instead of a ban on tricycles and motorcycles, the government ought to have called an urgent stakeholder engagement to fine-tune the traffic law and enforcement strategies.
Yusuf said: “Laws are made for man, not the other way round. The current wide-ranging routes covered by the restriction should be reviewed to cover only major road corridors. This would give some room for ordinary citizens to commute. The tolerance and latitude for the operation of tricycles should be expanded as they play vital complementary roles to other forms of transportation.”
He added: “They are affordable, scalable, divisible, flexible and less of a nuisance than the motorbikes.
Regulatory capacity should be strengthened to ensure traffic discipline among all categories of road users.”
He predicted some of the unintended consequences of the ban to include: Commuters suffering untold hardship as there is no immediate alternative to fill the gap which the wide-ranging restriction would create, a high transportation cost as commuter buses would hike their fares, saying that they would naturally take advantage of the surge in demand.
“There is also the investment effect on emerging innovative investments in the commercial motorbike sector some of which have invested billions of naira in the sector. Connectivity of domestic economic agents would suffer a deceleration. The tempo and momentum of economic activities would experience a slow down as the velocity of business transactions would be adversely affected.
This would also take a toll on the huge and vibrant informal economy in the state. There will also be massive extortion by enforcement agents,” he added.
According to the Director-General, one of the biggest challenges of urbanization is traffic congestion, pointing out that the situation is more so in a state like Lagos which has the largest population and the smallest land size in the country.
He said the growth in the number of vehicles has consistently outpaced the road capacity.
“We also recognize the increasing traffic and security nuisance that some of the commercial motorcycles and tricycles create in the state. Clearly, these are situations that call for drastic action by the government. However, it is important to situate the conversation within the context of a Root Cause Analysis,” he said.
Yusuf added that the proliferation of the commercial motorcycles and tricycles in Lagos state are manifestations of the shortcomings of the transportation system in Lagos State, stressing that they are the symptoms of deeper issues in the transport ecosystem.
“Some of these include Rapid and growing population in the state without commensurate planning for intracity transportation, rapid urbanization and internal migration issues because of the security issues in other parts of the country, high vehicular density, intractable traffic congestion and frequent lockdown, especially during peak periods of traffic,” he noted.
He also added that other issues include, absence of a robust mass transit system suitable for an increasing population and emerging megacity, limited road capacity which has been long outpaced by the vehicular growth, absence of complementary modes of transportation, especially water transportation, rail and subways, weak institutional capacity for enforcement of traffic regulations.
“These are the fundamentals issues we need to fix in order to achieve a sustainable solution. The enforcement of the traffic law in its current form would have a profound social, economic and political costs,” he said.
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