The Abuja Bus Rapid Transit has become a huge, multi-billion naira project. While it has continued to gulp money, residents say it is far from meeting its goal – to deliver a cheap, fast, easy-to-access transport system for the city’s growing population. Infrastructure seems to be the biggest obstacle. Although Abuja has smooth roads, there are no dedicated lanes for the BRT buses, as obtained in Lagos, which pioneered the BRT system. There are no stations or regular power and communication facilities to support the system. What is operational now is that every year, government spends billions of naira buying new buses that either get run down due to poor maintenance or are not available to commuters when they are needed most. The idea of a BRT started in 2006 when the Mallam Nasir el-Rufai administration procured about 500 buses and outlawed the use of ‘Okada’ (commercial motorcycles) in the city centre. The same year, the Abuja Urban Mass Transit Company also bought 192 buses to augment the transport system. AUMTCO had always been a key player in Abuja’s transport operations, but not on a BRT basis. All but 11 of the el-Rufai buses are said to have been written off as at today. The AUMTCO buses are said to be about 100. Along the line, more buses were bought in 2011 under the Subsidy Re-Investment Programme, while some private firms joined the fray this year. However, many residents are still not getting to work on time, nor are they reaching home early, in spite of a semblance of BRT in place in the FCT. The reason is that fewer road lanes means that the BRT buses are struggling for space with other vehicles, resulting in gridlock on a daily basis. Efforts to create dedicated lanes for the BRT have gone through twists and turns. For example, one of the routes programmed for BRT is the Abuja-Karu-Nyanya Expressway. The road has three narrow lanes that can hardly accommodate the increasing number of vehicles that ply it. Rather than expand the road, one of the three lanes has been ‘hijacked’ for BRT. The Federal Capital Territory Administration marked the lane with yellow paint in 2012 by writing “BRT Lane”, hoping that other motorists would leave it for the buses. This has not happened and there is no enforcement.The yellow-paint project was jettisoned in July this year when the administration awarded fresh contracts for the importation of rectangular traffic cones to demarcate the BRT Lane. The cones only appeared to have compounded the situation, as motorists rammed into them, causing multiple accidents. Some of the accidents resulted in fatality, severe injuries to commuters and damage to many vehicles. One angry resident, Anthony Ndubuisi, described the cones as “dead on arrival. ”Fidgety officials quickly removed the cones from the road, ostensibly to consider more options. Not withstanding the withdrawal of the cones, contractors are busy delivering the plastics and piling them up by the sides of the road, taking up a part of the service lane. This, in turn, made parking a difficult task. For the Abuja BRT, there is still no dedicated lane, no supporting infrastructure, while the promise to save time through the project remains a myth eight years after the first set of buses were delivered. “The way out remains the provision of adequate infrastructure. You don’t jump the gun by dumping buses on the people when the supporting facilities for the BRT are not available. “They have to expand all the roads they have designated as BRT routes or the challenges the project is facing will persist,” Ndubuisi tells this reporter. Another resident, Isa Kabiru, feels not much of public enlightenment is done by administrators when they introduce projects. Citing the example of the cones, Kabiru argues that in a city where people are used to driving at top speed without obstruction, they have to be well-informed ahead of time that there is going to be some form of demarcation. He says, “I was not surprised when vehicles started ramming into the plastic cones, uprooting them from the road. There was no prior enlightenment, no warning signs; nothing to warn motorists that there was a demarcation ahead. “Many motorists descending the AYA Bridge, for example, did not realise that cones had been mounted to demarcate the service lane. They descended the bridge at top speed and had no option but to crash into the cones. “If you went to Nyanya and the Karu bridges, you would know that the cones mounted there were also damaged by vehicles before they were hurriedly removed in August.“Public enlightenment would have saved people the pain and sorrows they suffered due to the accidents.”It is not all bad news, though. Some residents appreciate the “slight drop” in transport cost with the BRT buses in operation. Yet, there is another twist to this fare cut – it is “whenever the buses are available.”A senior official of the administration, however, defends the BRT project, saying it has come to stay.According to the official, who works in the Transport Secretariat, but says he is not the right authority to quote, the project is “merely facing preliminary challenges.”He claims that the city of Bangkok, for instance, opened its BRT in 2010.“That is a recent development in some way if you consider the level of infrastructural development in Bangkok. Only one route is operational there, though in their design, there should be five routes or more.“So, it will be a gradual process until we get there.“The infrastructure will surely come. Government has in place all the plans to make the BRT functional; but funding is an issue and it will take a while for everything to be in place.“All the same, we shall get there,” the official says.For now, the red, blue and green buses take no one faster to a destination than other commercial vehicles. Save for the relative cheaper fare, the BRT is on the same pace with them.
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