…As Ikeja Bus Terminal remain out of use months after inauguration
Months after President Muhammadu Buhari commissioned the Ikeja Bus Terminal; bus services planned for the terminus are yet to take off as the massive ground remains ghost area.
But the latest news on the sector is that the operator of Bus Rapid Transit system in Lagos, Primero Transport Services Limited (PTSL), is putting finishing touches on its emerging Bus Assembly plant to begin production by second quarter of 2019.
This was revealed by the Managing Director, Mr Fola Tinubu, during a media parley in Lagos, hinting that the feat will be prior to the phasing out manual ticketing and replacing same with a card system in the first quarter of 2019.
According to him, the group has sealed Memorandum of Understanding with Yutong, to establish the bus assembly plant in Lagos.
He added that the plant, built at Epe would go into mass production of high capacity buses by the second quarter of 2019 when a new Bus Rapid Transport (BRT) corridor being constructed by the Lagos State Government between Oshodi and Abule-Egba would have been completed and ready for use.
Checks along the popular Lagos-Agege motor Road showed ongoing concrete cement works on the dedicated lane which will host the BRT corridor.
PTSL is confident that it will win the bid to operate the Abule-Egba/Oshodi corridor, and is ready to deploy about 350 buses in the route to service traffic on the route.
Additional details on the performance of the company since take off in 2015 showed that it has about 434 buses conveying 150,000 people daily across major terminals between Ikorodu and Tafawa Balewa Square.
Continuing, Tinubu averred that PTSL is working on a template to increase to average daily passenger traffic to 200,000 on the Ikorodu/TBS corridor immediately it upgrades buses to 2,000 with capacity to convey one million passengers daily.
Business Hilights recalls that operators on the BRT lane, who are 100 per cent privately-owned, had been paying certain percentage of its revenue to the state government which gave operators the needed exclusive right to use the dedicated BRT lanes constructed by the government.
