Public transport, especially land transportation such as motorists, is the most common means of transportation in my community here in Lagos, and although Lagos is known to be the headquarters of traffic congestion in the whole of Nigeria, well, that isn't really the biggest plight I face in my community as the challenges of public transport, and in this article I'll be telling you what those challenges are and my proposed solution to normalize things.
The problems with our public transport here are enormous, from notably traffic congestion, like I said earlier, to bad vehicles that look like scrap and are not supposed to be on the road, to scarcity of fuel, increasing fee prices, and disturbance from multiple tax collectors. All of the later I mentioned literally make the drivers have no choice but to increase their charges, thereby making movement from one place to another more expensive by the day.
The biggest problem I think our public transport faces is the bad state of most of the vehicles here in my community. I'm totally not pleased with the conditions of this vehicle, be it bus, car, or tricycle; they're mostly just looking like what has been used for more than 30 years and has been involved in multiple accidents, and probably that's why there are lots of dent and bad parts on it, making the car look like scrap and like something that might injure you if you aren't careful.
Most of them don't have any safety measures, and they also park a lot of passengers, making everything fill the vehicle like we're set of frozen fish waiting to be transported from one place to another. It's just unsafe; being too close to other people can lead to easy transmission of germs, flu, and disease, but then it's what we've got, and we have no choice but to use it since we don't own vehicles of our own.
Other challenges, as stated above, are regarding the multiple tax collectors on the road making motor vehicles pay an exorbitant fee in tax for driving via that route. Sometimes I calculate the amount this driver pays for tax and add it to the amount of fuel they'll buy to run the vehicle, and I can't help but wonder how they survive because sometimes when you calculate it all, it's like they're spending over 60 percent on expensive on the road, and that doesn't even include what will go for vehicle maintenance when the need for that arises.
The last one on my list of problems that plague our public transport in my community that I want to talk about is regarding the increasing price of fuel. It's just ridiculous, and the value of fuel keeps increasing by the day. It's really a shame for us as an oil-producing nation to experience such. I mean, what's the point of being one of the top 10 oil-producing nations in the world and yet your citizens can't afford it?
The price of petrol has skyrocketed from about 160 naira to over 800 naira in the last year, and I still can't understand why it's so. This has led to an increase in charges for public transport, making it difficult for people to survive. I mean, a route I used to travel to and pay 2500 naira is now being charged for nothing less than 7000 naira.
We can't blame the drivers entirely for this, and that's why we're crying for the government to look into this and reduce the price of fuel, so the cost of living, including transportation, can reduce drastically, and that way everyone will be able to afford the public transport, not using over half of their wages on just transportation monthly.
Also regarding the bad state of the public vehicles, I think the government will need to come through in this aspect. The economy is going down the slope, and not many people can afford new and good vehicles, but if the government introduces good vehicles into the streets and gives them to those drivers to pay installmentally, I believe it will change the face of our road, and the former bad vehicles can either be scrapped to do other things or taken to a farm where they might be needed to transport crops and the like.
Regarding the multiple taxes, the government needs to do better and stop charging a motorized exorbitant fee, and it's even annoying when you'll see these drivers paying to about five to six tax collectors on the same route; it's annoying and not helping in any way. While tax is good, it shouldn't be too much, and I believe if they reduce that, it'll help our public transport. And beside, we don't even know who's from the government and who's just doing it as though they're government agencies, so I think a formal payment method would be better than the one we see on the road.
All photos used in this article are mine.
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