Innovative traffic solutions
Lagos, a city notorious for its peak and off peak go-slows, could benefit from real-time analysis of data from mobile phones, call centres, cameras and global positioning satellites, based on recently concluded report by researchers from IBM on the Lagos Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (LAMATA) and the ministries of Transportation, Works and Infrastructure, Science and Technology.
The number of cars in Lagos is predicted to grow by 350 percent in 25 years and by 2030, 40million people will regard themselves as Lagosians. These projections will increase the stress of commuting by road, unless rail and water transport are developed.
Decongesting Lagos, the booming commercial hub of West Africa, by fixing infrastructure could spread economic growth. Business in Nigeria is highly concentrated in Lagos and has failed to extend elsewhere because markets are poorly connected, whether by land, air or water.
A fragmented market is an investors’ nightmare. Building agriculture industrial parks look good on paper but only a few daring investors will hurry to set up shop in other parts of Nigeria. These intrepid investors e.g. Dangote, Shoprite, MDS/Imperial Logistics, Actis, DHL are adopting innovation – gas-powered trucks, logistic parks etc. – to reduce the cost of doing business. “Superior logistics” is said to be the linchpin of Nigeria’s growing retail sector.
Other innovations- the use of data from cheap mobile phones in Africa- is proving to be a gold mine for fixing problems like traffic congestion. Five billion of the world’s 6.8 billion mobile phone subscribers are in developing countries. (The International Telecommunication Union mobile estimates there are 63 mobile phones per 100 people).
In 2012, Orange, a mobile network operator, released 2.5billion anonymous records of five million Ivoirians to researchers. Using the data, researchers at IBM developed a transport model called AllAboard. It was developed by sieving through data from 500,000 phones to get data transport patterns on trips in Abidjan: on 539 buses, 5,000 mini buses and 11,000 taxis.
The data-driven traffic model revealed more efficient routes. The results are promising for reducing transport costs, improving urban transport and serve as “the building blocks of development efforts” according to Francesco Calabrese, a researcher at IBM that worked on the project.
Babatunde Fashola, governor, Lagos State, is keen on innovation; particularly those that help the government keep up with the herculean and continuous process of managing the megacity. An integrated e-ticketing system modelled after the MetroCard in New York and the Oyster card in London, is one recommendation by the IBM team. Despite the challenges of implementation such as system: limited economies of scale because the card industry in Nigeria is small and penetration is low, a pilot project on BRT could serve as learning curve and give insights. Last April in Kenya, the location of IBM’s first research lab in Africa, Google and Equity Bank launched BebaPay, a mobile payment technology that makes paying for trips easy.
We concede with Fashola that “technology is the key to the future”. We also commend the commitment of the Lagos State government to incorporate the team’s recommendations into its infrastructure strategy. We strongly urge that the privacy of users must not be neglected – transparency and accountability must complement efficiency – mobile phones are a data trove of information on users’ location, commercial activity, search history, social networks etc.