Tin Can Port’s traffic of horror
Traffic on the Tin Can Island road stretch from the Liverpool bridge to the popular Coconut and Trinity bus stops has become a perennial, intractable horror. The road may as well be officially named ‘Trucks Only Road’ as smaller private vehicles and commercial buses have shunned using it because of the grinding traffic gridlock that has permanently become its feature. As the Sunday Trust discovered over a week’s observation, it is one stretch on which a truck can be stuck for up to three days without moving a metre
By Temitayo Odunlami, who was in Lagos
The resigned countenance, three weeks ago, of Ahmed Bello, a one-star officer with the Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA), underlined the horror and helplessness that the traffic gridlock on the Tin Can Island expressway has become. Bello is the LASTMA official deployed at the first gate end of the Tin Can Island Port (TCIP) road to attempt to create sanity out of the intractable bedlam that is the traffic on the expressway.
But, obviously, after another day of unsuccessful efforts at his assignment, the traffic official was at the end of his tethers. Looking so weary in the long container that is his makeshift office under the pedestrian bridge at the first gate, Bello frustratingly waved his left hand at the long lines of trucks stuck in the jam on both sides of the dualised road, momentarily looked away from the Sunday Trust reporter interviewing him to glance at the long wheelers and then exclaimed, “Only God can solve this problem.”
Mr Olufemi Olorunfunmi wouldn’t resort to divine intervention; he believed that it is for man to fix. Olorunfunmi, who is the Apapa Zonal Financial Secretary of the Petroleum Tanker Drivers Association (PTD), a branch of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) directly suffers from the traffic problem. Tankers owns are sometimes, he lamented, held up in the queue for days waiting to load fuel at tank farms located adjacent the port. The transporter told the Sunday Trust that traffic on the road would be free if the federal and Lagos State governments lived up to their responsibilities.
“To say the Tin Can Island roads are bad is not describing the situation well. Trucks are constantly breaking down there, with sometimes the containers they are conveying falling off and blocking smooth flow of traffic. The federal government only needs to repair the road and the traffic jam problem there will be solved,” he believed.
Probably. This publication observed three weeks ago that greater portions of the service lanes of the carriageway between Coconut bus stop and the second gate of the Tin Can Island port had, indeed, broken down and the result was that all vehicles, 99 per cent of them heavy trucks, were concentrated on the expressway. With the speed lanes of the expressway also dotted here and there with their own gullies, the trucks were compelled to manoeuvre their way through, when they could, at a snail speed.
When they could is emphasised, because certain factors are always contriving to produce a complete cessation of vehicular movement for hours on both sides of the expressway. Our reporter observed for three days how traffic moving towards the Mile 2 area from the Liverpool-Tin Can Island area was rendered a snail-and-stall affair due to a wide damaged portion of the road at Coconut bus stop, opposite the array of tank farms.
The situation was compounded on one of the days when a truck conveying a container broke down and completely paralysed vehicular movement on the stretch for virtually the whole day. Olorunfunmi said such a scene is not a rarity, as trucks, many of them old since they were not bought brand new and have been in service for many years, often break down to cause hours of traffic jam.
As regard containers falling off trucks while the drivers labour to negotiate, potholes, nine such incidents were recorded within six days last November alone, killing two people and damaging goods worth over N200 million,
As the federal government always tarries in rehabilitating the road when the potholes start emerging, ceaseless downpour of rain worsens the situation and potholes deepen into gullies. A truck driver, who simply called himself Saliu, said driving through the road early this year before the rainy season began was, at least, less horrendous, if never smooth. Saliu stated that within an hour in January, he could drive from the base of the Liverpool bridge past the Coconut bus stop, a distance of only about 400 metres which constitutes the Tin Can Island road traffic notoriety. But since April, navigating just that short span, he repined, can take him four hours when there is no vehicle breakdown. Whenever he is unfortunate to be within the area when there is a breakdown, as he was the day the Sunday Trust chatted with him, he could spend the whole day there.
The other wing of the expressway, which leads the Mile 2 road to the Tin Can Island stretch and beyond that to the Apapa port, assails the sight worse. Long lines of fuel tankers and cargo trailers lay stationary over three lanes, their drivers, rather than behind the wheels were elsewhere, indicating hours of inactivity. According to Bello, truck drivers, most of them heading into either any of the tank farms to load petroleum products, or into the Tin Can Island port to be loaded with consignments, can spend three to four days on the queue on the service road before they are able to gain access into the port. Olorunfunmi confirmed it, but still blamed it on bad roads, rather than the menace of tankers waiting to load petroleum products from the farm tanks, which many stakeholders finger as a principal culprit in the traffic problem.
The federal government is already hearkening to advice like Mr. Olorunfunmi’s to work on the bad road. It has taken the road’s rehabilitation contract off Borini Prono, the construction company hitherto given the job and transferred it to Julius Berger. After the construction giant set to effecting an emergency repair job on the road, the gridlock had thawed by last week. Users of the road and transport experts are, however, not convinced there won’t be a return to the bottleneck, as has perennially been the situation. To Mr Chigozie Chikere, a transport expert and member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics & Transport, it will take more than just rehabilitating that fourlane carriageway to permanently address the problem. There are, he asserted, more germane transportation logistics the federal government must address.
Indeed, the traffic gridlock on the Tin Can Island road has become a perennial headache, as the number of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) unceasingly using it increases, rendering it inadequate to cope with usage and, worse, resulting in constant deterioration that government’s occasional repair intervention has not been able to permanently address.
The federal government commissioned the Tin Can Island port on 14 October, 1977 to complement the Apapa port as shipping and import activities exponentially intensified. With the port came the Tin Can Island dual carriageway to aid cargo evacuation from the new port towards the old, existing routes of Apapa-Ijora-Western Avenue and the Mile 2-Oshodi/ Mile 2 Badagry expressway.
However, as government’s planning in Nigeria goes, there was no rail network factored into the new port’s cargo evacuation modal. To president of the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Alhaji Remi Bello, speaking who spoke in Lagos at the LCCI’s 2014 quarterly press conference on the economy, LASTMA’s Bello, Olorunfunmi and