os metro draws on national expertise
Theatre west to Okokomaiko, and east across a bridge to Marina on Lagos Island is projected to open one to two years after that.
The line is being built to standard gauge and will have 600V dc third rail electrification. Trains will operate at 5-minute headways during the peak and at 10-minute intervals at other times, and once fully operational the line will have sufficient capacity to carry 60,000 passengers per hour, per direction. Several of the planned 13 stations will be located in the central reservation of the new 10-lane Badagry Expressway toll road where the line will run west of Eric Moore Road close to Ignamu station. On the stretch east of the new road to Marina the line will be elevated. The Blue Line is part of plans for a
comprehensive network for the city which could eventually span seven lines. An extension of the Blue Line west to Ojo is envisaged as the next phase of the Lagos rail network which also includes the Red Line, a 35km north-south route from Agbado to Marina which will connect with the extension of the Blue Line to Marina on Lagos Island and share existing NRC infrastructure going north. It will serve 14 stations and early projections show the service carrying up to 500,000 passengers per day. The Red Line sponsors are currently trying to negotiate access to the right-of-way.
PPP venture
to improve through the launch of the 27km east-west Blue Line of Lagos’ new metro, with construction of the first 8km phase now underway.
The Blue Line was suggested as long ago as 1980 when it was included in the Transport Master Plan, and was initially conceived as a single project. However, following the financial crisis of 2008 it was decided to split the project into two phases; the first 8km phase from Mile 2 to National Theatre is projected to open in 2016, and the line from National
IRJ June 2013
Lamata, which was formed in 2003 as a semi-autonomous agency of Lagos’ state government, was keen to explore the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) for the implementation of its rail projects following the success of a similar PPP venture for the bus scheme. In addition to conceptual design, Canadian consultancy CPCS was appointed under a contract in 2006 to undertake a pre-feasibility study and conceptual design for the Blue Line. Rail projects, and in particular passenger rail projects, are inevitably capital intensive and require large amounts of up-front investment. Mr Derrick Lichti, a principal consultant and head of the modelling and urban transport practices at CPCS, who was the team leader of the demand study for the Lagos project, says that the preliminary analysis clearly showed that the capital investment for all fixed infrastructure could not be borne by the private sector alone. As a result he says the project was structured in a manner that required infrastructure investment
by both the government and private parties.
On a rail project such as the Blue Line, Lichti says two major upfront
capital investments are required: the fixed infrastructure - track,
bridges, stations, railway systems, and the moveable assets - rolling stock. Although rail vehicles can be transported and re-deployed elsewhere, fixed infrastructure by its very nature does not have this flexibility. As a result CPCS determined early on that this element of the project would be less attractive to private investors and public funds would be required from the start. Lagos state government funds and well-subscribed bond sales were expected to provide the necessary funding to construct the fixed infrastructure. Although a major upside for the implementation of the project, Lichti says investor appetite for the operations and maintenance contract was still uncertain. As a result an extensive demand study and financial analysis was required to determine the parameters under which an operations and maintenance concession would operate.
“It is no big secret that passenger services are rarely profitable,” Lichti says. “The demand study carried out for the Blue Line demonstrated what anyone who has ever driven in Lagos knows - there are a lot of people travelling throughout the city at all hours of the day. This was a critical finding because it was still undecided who would take revenue risk on the project. Given the government’s major financial commitment to build the fixed infrastructure, it was preferable for the revenue risk to be allocated to the operator.”
Lichti adds that one of the other key findings of the demand study was that Lagosians were spending a staggering amount of time transiting throughout the city. “This did not go unnoticed by the project team, who often experienced a three to five hour round-trip from National Theatre to Okokomaiko,” he says. “The economic impact of the Blue Line will be incredible.”
The study consequently found that a
segregated rail mass transit system would cut this journey time to less than 30 minutes each way, regardless of the time of day, and estimated demand at 300,000 passengers per day by the end of the first year of full operation, which using a fixed tariff of approximately $US 1 (at 2008 prices), meant that revenue potential was strong. To test the theory that demand would
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