The Permanent Secretary, Lagos State Ministry of Transportation, Mr. Olawale Musa, has said that the Red Line train of Lagos State Government will transport between 100,000 and 150,000 persons daily when fully operational.
Giving the update on the red rail project, Musa said that the red rail was currently undergoing a test run and when fully operational it would greatly ease the menace of traffic in Lagos state.
“The blue line is operational, while we have just commenced test-running on the red line. The Blue Line can take 1,000 people and it currently operates 72 trips daily. That is a lot of people removed from the traffic every day.
“Also, the red line can accommodate 800 people, but we are just test running; we cannot give the number of trips it can go for now, especially because we don’t have total control over the rail tracks. We are sharing the tracks with the Nigeria Railway Corporation and because they are also using the same track, our speed and everything else have to be regulated by them and that will affect the number of trips we can go on daily.
“But we hope that all these technicalities will be resolved during this test run and then we can come out to say our red line will go this particular number of trips daily,” Musa told the Punch newspaper in an interview on Tuesday.
He added that the state government had also aggressively continued in the regeneration of junctions as well as the expansion of roads in the state.
He also assured residents that the Lagos State Government was not resting in its oars to ensure that the state’s increasing population was planned for and well taken care of.
“We are consolidating in what was already on the ground. If you look around Lagos, you will see that there is a lot of improvement, expansion of roads, and junction improvement, among others. This is mainly to ensure that traffic congestion becomes a thing of the past,” he said.
GIK/APA