• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

Fresh hope on Lagos cable car as construction begins Q3 2019

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Six years after it signed an agreement to begin its proposed first commercial cable car transportation system in Lagos, Nigeria, Ropeways Transport Limited, says it is closing in on its financials and looking to commence construction work from the third quarter of 2019.

The company’s position comes to renew fading hope on the multi-million project conceived to partly address the trauma that Nigerians go through in crawling gridlocks in the commercial city of Lagos. It is estimated that traffic congestion in Lagos costs the state’s economy a whopping $42 million monthly.

Hope has fading on the project as residents who earlier received the idea with some excitement continue to wait in vain for six years.

“The cable car project is still very much alive. At the moment, the project is in due diligence stage working towards financial close. Barring any unforeseen events, construction should commence in the third quarter of 2019,” Dapo Olumide, managing director of Ropeways Transport Limited told BusinessDay on Friday.

The project had been planned as Public Private Partnership (PPP), as Ropeways signed a 30-year agreement with Lagos State Government in 2013, to build the transport system at an estimated cost of $500 million.

It was to be partly financed by the African Development Bank (AfDB) and would create an estimated 500 direct jobs upon completion, with commuters paying between $1.28 and $1.92 per trip, with the capacity to accommodate up to 240,000 trips daily.

Under the agreement, Ropeways would construct towers, stations and connecting network cables along various routes covered in the first phase of the project. The routes included Ijora – Iddo, Iddo – Adeniji, Apapa – Oluwole, Oluwole – Adeniji, Adeniji – Obalende, Obalende – Falomo, and Falomo – Victoria Island.

Olumide in an interview with BusinessDay in 2016 had linked the delay to a number of factors include securing the right of way, exchange rate and the 2015 electioneering campaigns. He said that the company would in July (2016) unveil details of the construction works, which should have commenced in 2015 but had to be shifted due to the general elections and tense political atmosphere in the country at the time.

“You recall that I had announced we would begin construction in December 2015. But we could not because of the instability associated with the election year. With that over, came instability in the exchange (naira to dollar). So we have lost one year.  Now we want to see where the naira goes and by July (2016), we will unveil the construction details,” Olumide, former managing director of Virgin Nigeria Airlines, told BusinessDay in 2016.

The cable car would integrate various standard safety features including CCTV monitoring, audio communication links and passenger address systems. It was to complement existing transport modes and would play a major part in reducing congestion by encouraging car owners to ride it as an alternative to putting their vehicles on the roads.

The idea was further supported by statistics from studies conducted by Lagos Metropolitan Transport Authority (LAMATA) in 2009 which showed that an additional 200,000 vehicles were registered annually in Lagos State. This equates to 222 vehicles per kilometre of road in Lagos, which by far outweighs the national average of 11 vehicles per kilometer of road, with vehicles estimated to contribute more than 70 per cent of the air pollution in Lagos.

Cable car system is rated as one of the safest means of transport worldwide. Based on a 2009 study by the Vancouver Metropolitan Transport Agency in Canada, passengers are 20,000 times more likely to be involved in a fatal accident in a vehicle than in a cable car.

Dayo Mobereola, the immediate past commissioner for transportation in Lagos State affirmed in 2016 that the project was on course.

“The Lagos cable car project is on course. It is privately driven and the private sector needs to get all the permits. On the side of Lagos, we have given them the entire necessary permit, they are talking to the Federal Government to get some level of guarantees and we have assisted them to write to the Federal Government.”

 However, Ladi Lawnason, the incumbent commissioner for transportation in the state, in an interview with BusinessDay, said although the government not pulled out from the deal, the project is not the immediate focus of the current administration.

“I know they had issues relating to land and securing the right of way to execute the project in a timely manner. However, there are other modes that we’re focusing on in our strategic transport master plan.

We’re aggressively pursuing the completion of the rail: the Blue line, the Red line and others. We’re also focusing on the water transportation sector and making it more attractive to investors and passengers.  We’re also focusing on our Bus Reform Initiative (BRI) which the governor will be launching next week or so.  The cable car will come but it is not our immediate focus,” said Lawanson.