Lagos bans trucks from its roads over incessant gridlock

The Lagos state government Friday directed owners and operators of articulated vehicles/trailers and petroleum tankers to stay away from the state over incessant gridlock for the time being.

The state’s acting commissioner for transportation, Olanrewaju Elegushi, said the move was to ease gridlock that continued to pose a great challenge to Apapa and its environs, as it impacted mobility and commercial activities negatively.

Elegushi said investigations revealed that the heavy traffic was a direct result of the challenges being faced by operators of the ports in loading trucks that had arrived to evacuate imported items.

He added that the gridlock was worsened by the current rehabilitation of some major and minor roads which had necessitated the closure of some routes in Apapa.

On his part, Steve Ayorinde, Commissioner for Information and Strategy, who was also at the briefing, said, “We keep having this issue of gridlock in Apapa because issues that the ports authorities and the concessionaires are dealing with are recurrent and the spillover effect of those issues are causing all these.

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“If the ports can’t determine how many trucks they are able to deal with on a daily basis; how they are informed about coming in and going out, then it will be a problem to deal with.

“What we need to do is to keep on engaging with them, we keep on engaging with other states and so on. I mean, people who have trucks in other states and already know that there is a logjam in Lagos, why send other trucks to Lagos?

“The idea is not to say don’t come into Lagos. It is part of what makes the economy of Lagos what it is but we are saying let us deal with the logjam that we have presently and there is no way we can deal with it, we can only deal with the effect because the causes essentially have to do with the operations at the Ports and that is why we are appealing to them”.

The government said that there were alternatives that could serve, urging the operators to utilise the Ogere trailer park and other parks outside the state in the interim to avoid further hardship for motorists on the road.

 

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