Trying To Solve Traffic Congestion In Lagos Or What?

Imagine running into these words online on a hot Saturday afternoon, “Trade in those wooden Danfo seats for luxury leather of a private car! Join our community on drop.trafficng.com”. Immediately, my brain did the “wholl’up wholl’up” thingy. I decided to follow the link. What I found, I’ll reveal to you at the end of this piece.

Quick question, do you take public transportation in Lagos and you are tired of jumping from one Danfo to another to get to your destination? Before you start saying, “Public transportation? Who does that?” Please note that many of us take public transports. Danfos, LT Buses, Coaster, BRT, we take them all. Let me digress a bit. Am I the only one who feels there’s a lot of pretense going on online? I mean, you read certain blogs’ comments’ section and almost everyone says they drive their car, or cab to their destination.

Rarely will you see people mention our ever popular Lagos Danfos as their everyday means of transportation. Yet every day I leave home for work, I meet lots of people at bus stops waiting for buses. My question is who are these people if you all don’t take buses?

Anyways, back to the matter. You know how you are at a bus stop waiting for a bus going your way and all you see are private cars. Then you begin to wonder why they don’t stop to pick passengers going their way even if they’ll charge fares? Well, the link is about just that.

It’s basically about private car owners meeting up with passengers going their route on the website so as to pick them up and drop them on their way at an agreed price or at zero cost (depends on the car owner). Also passengers could log on to the app to find car owners going their way. Let me simplify it for you.

Let’s say I own a car, I live in Surulere and my workplace is at Anthony. I could then go on to the website, fill a questionnaire and I get connected to people going to or heading towards Surulere as at the time I’d be leaving work. We agree on a fee and I pick them up on my way home. Then I drop them at the agreed destination so long as it’s still on my route. Or if I were a passenger, looking for a ride to Surulere, I could simply log on to the website, fill the questionnaire and search for people going my way.

We agree on a price, they pick me up at the pre-agreed point and drop me off as agreed. Cool right? Just what I thought!

This will definitely reduce traffic congestion if it is allowed to thrive. Less traffic and everyone gets home in peace.

However, if you were/are a car owner, would you give rides to strangers at a cost? As much as this idea is great and will save me the usual long wait at the bus stop, I won’t give it a try at this time. As for me, this na real time security breach. What if I hook up with someone who is on a different mission?

This is a case of buyers’ beware.