Nigeria’s gridlocked commercial hub of Lagos started operating its first light-rail system on Monday, 12 years after it first planned to start ferrying riders.
Construction of the 13-kilometer (8 mile) line began in 2009 with services slated to start in 2011, but funding constraints for the 100 billion-naira ($132 million) project delayed the plan. The line built by China Civil Engineering Construction Corp. was opened by Lagos Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu on Monday and will carry 150,000 passengers daily, according to Lagos Metropolitan Area Transport Authority.
Lagos state, home to 20 million residents, has the world’s worst traffic, according to data from Numbeo, a crowd-sourced online database. While the so-called blue line will help, Sanwo-Olu in 2021 said that the city, which lures Nigerians from across the country, needs $15 billion over five years to improve road and transportation networks.
The traffic Index is for mid-2023 and is a measure including commute time, dissatisfaction with time spent in traffic, CO2 emissions, and overall traffic system inefficiencies.
Sanwo-Olu, wearing a train operator’s uniform for the event, moved from one coach to another announcing names of stops and occasionally speaking with passengers. When fully operational, the train will carry as many as 1,200 passengers per trip and cut the journey time from Mile 2 near the Tin Can Island — the nation’s busiest sea port — to Marina on Lagos Island to 25 minutes from as long as 3 hours.
“A mega city cannot function without an effective metro line,” said Adetilewa Adebajo, chief executive of Lagos-based CFG Advisory. “However, Lagos needs not just the metro line. It has to develop waterways too, being a coastal city. It needs an integrated transport system. Those are what will be able to relieve the congestions in the city.”
For now, traffic gridlock costs the administration about 4 trillion naira a year because of lost work-hours as commuters spend a total of 14.1 million hours a day in traffic, according to a 2021 report by Lagos-based Danne Institute of Research.
Sanwo-Olu first commissioned the blue line in December, but it couldn’t start operations because a facility to power the tracks wasn’t ready. The metro will now use a diesel locomotive for four weeks until the power plant is ready to connect to the tracks.
Such inefficiencies abound in Nigeria. In 2018, the government inaugurated a train linking the capital, Abuja, with its airport. Five years on, train cars are locked away at a depot. Meanwhile, Nigeria is spending $50 million a year paying down the project’s $500 million of loans from the Export-Import Bank of China.