For millions of Lagos residents, the journey to work begins long before they arrive at their offices and often ends hours after the official closing time.
A trip that should take less than an hour can consume several hours as commuters negotiate gridlocked roads, broken-down vehicles, road construction, illegal parking and the sheer volume of traffic competing for limited lane space.
The scale of the problem is reflected in Numbeo’s 2026 mid-year Traffic Index, which put Lagos’ Traffic Index at 348.5 and its average one-way commute at about 68.3 minutes.
But while Lagos has continued to seek ways to ease congestion, other megacities facing similar population pressures have increasingly shifted their focus from moving more cars to moving more people.
That distinction could hold lessons for Lagos as it develops its own multimodal transport system.
When traffic becomes a lifestyle
The debate was recently reignited after Obafemi Hamzat, Lagos deputy governor, described the city’s perennial traffic as a ‘lifestyle’ while speaking at PodFest Naija, a gathering of creatives.
‘Anyone who has crossed Third Mainland Bridge at 6pm knows that Lagos traffic is not the problem; it’s just a lifestyle,’ Hamzat said.
He noted that the hours spent by Lagosians in traffic had inadvertently created an audience for podcasters and other content creators.
The comment generated criticism, with some interpreting it as acceptance of a problem that imposes high costs on commuters and businesses.
Hamzat subsequently clarified that his remarks had been made in the context of the creative industry and were intended to illustrate how Lagosians consume digital content during long journeys, rather than suggest that congestion was desirable or that the government was comfortable with it.
The controversy, however, has highlighted a more fundamental question: why has traffic remained such a persistent feature of life in a city that has invested heavily in roads and, increasingly, rail and water transport?
Lagos is building alternatives
Successive Lagos administrations have invested in attempts to reduce dependence on roads.
The Bus Rapid Transit system, launched in 2008, created dedicated corridors for buses and significantly changed public transport along some major routes.
The state has also introduced rail into its transport mix. The Lagos Rail Mass Transit Blue Line, which runs between Marina and Mile 2, commenced commercial operations in September 2023, while the Red Line began full commercial passenger operations in October 2024.
The Blue Line has recorded more than nine million cumulative passenger journeys across more than 70,000 trips in its first three years, according to figures from the Lagos Metropolitan Area Transport Authority.
Water transport is another potentially important alternative. With extensive lagoons, creeks and waterways, Lagos has a geographical advantage that many cities do not have. Yet these alternatives have not displaced the dominance of road transport.
Olayemi Dickson, a transport and logistics expert, said the continued dependence on roads is partly the result of the historical dominance and flexibility of road-based transport.
She also pointed to inadequate integration between transport modes, limited reach and frequency of rail and waterways, insufficient investment in non-road infrastructure and policies that have historically prioritised road expansion.
‘Lagos’s continued reliance on road transport is primarily rooted in several structural and policy factors,’ Dickson said.
Delhi’s lesson: build at scale
Delhi demonstrates what happens when mass transit becomes a central component of urban mobility rather than an alternative operating on the margins.
The Delhi Metro has grown into a network spanning more than 400 kilometres across the wider Delhi-NCR area and recorded about 2.36 billion passenger journeys in 2025, according to the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation.
The significance for Lagos is not simply the size of the network. It is the ability of rail to move millions of passengers daily while reducing the number of journeys that would otherwise have to be made by car or bus.
Lagos’ rail expansion therefore needs to be viewed as a network rather than a collection of individual lines.
The greater opportunity would come from connecting rail stations with BRT routes, conventional buses, waterways, walking infrastructure and other last-mile services.
Mumbai’s transport spine
Mumbai offers another lesson. The Indian commercial capital has long relied on suburban rail as the backbone of its transport system. As of February 2026, India’s Ministry of Railways said Western and Central Railway operated 3,230 suburban services, including AC services, across Mumbai.
The model demonstrates the importance of a high-capacity transport spine serving large numbers of people throughout the day.
For Lagos, rail could play that role along the busiest corridors, while buses and waterways provide connections to neighbourhoods beyond railway stations.
Tokyo’s lesson: make the system work together
Tokyo provides perhaps the clearest illustration of what an integrated urban transport system can achieve.
The city has an extensive network of trains, subways, buses and other transport options, allowing residents to move around without relying exclusively on private cars. Tokyo’s official tourism authority describes the city as having a comprehensive public transportation network combining JR trains, subways, buses and waterbuses.
The lesson for Lagos is not that the city can reproduce Tokyo’s system overnight.
Rather, it is that transport policy has to make alternatives sufficiently reliable, connected and convenient for residents to choose them.
Roads alone cannot solve Lagos’ problem
Dickson said congestion is also worsened by weak traffic enforcement, illegal parking, route deviations, poor road maintenance, inadequate pedestrian facilities, ageing vehicles and ineffective route planning.
‘Road transport in Lagos is operating beyond its sustainable capacity, especially during peak hours,’ she said.
She recommended stronger enforcement, real-time traffic management, improved route planning and vehicle maintenance in the short term, alongside accelerated investment in rail and water transport.
The challenge is therefore bigger than traffic management. A new road can temporarily increase capacity, but population growth and increased vehicle ownership can quickly consume that capacity. The more sustainable approach is to provide alternatives capable of carrying large numbers of commuters.
For Lagos, that means expanding the rail network, increasing BRT capacity and reliability, developing waterways, improving pedestrian infrastructure and integrating all these modes into a single transport system.
At the same time, road infrastructure itself continues to present problems. Poor road surfaces, construction-related bottlenecks, illegal parking, informal loading points and traffic indiscipline compound congestion on already busy corridors such as Lekki-Epe and other major routes.
The experience of Delhi, Mumbai and Tokyo suggests that the objective for a megacity should be to give residents dependable alternatives to sitting in traffic, not simply to make them better at enduring it.