The Lagos State government has said it would dismantle more roundabouts and junctions on roads across the state to solve the perennial Lagos traffic and reduce the travel time of commuters in the state.
Frederic Oladeinde, the commissioner for transport, said during a media roundtable Saturday that the roundabouts and junctions were built when the state’s population was 3-5 million.
At the current population of 22 million, according to him, they now compound the traffic situation, instead of helping solve them.
“You will discover that most of our roundabouts are now bottlenecks, rather than solving problems they are now creating problems,” Mr Oladeinde said.
“And what the current administration has done is to locate all the 60 gridlock points, that is the roundabouts and junctions that are causing problems and what we are doing is to reconfigure most of them.
“For example, Allen roundabout was a roundabout, and when we were about five million people it was a very nice roundabout, I remember about 20 years ago going to Allen roundabout was like going abroad. But Allen roundabout has now become a choke point.
“So we simply had to do was to take it out, reconfigure so that we can increase the capacity of that roundabout. You will agree with me that right now, going through Allen roundabout, you won’t spend more than five minutes as opposed to about 30-45 minutes that we used to spend just to traverse that roundabout.
“We are now moving further to Abraham Adesanya, which is another choke point, and we’ve taken out that roundabout and in the next one month we will complete it. That will complement the Jubilee Bridge that was developed around sangotedo, Ajah area.
“We’ve taken out the roundabouts at Lekki 1 and 2. As soon as we synchronise them with the rest of the traffic lights along that expressway, people will be able to move seamlessly.”
