Estimating Private Cost of Commuting in Metropolitan Lagos

Abstract

The recent focus on how to internalize the external costs of commuting have open a frontier of researches in estimating the private cost of commuting, however, there is still the dearth of knowledge on what constitute social cost of transportation in developing countries. This study estimates the private costs of commuting in Metropolitan Lagos. Data were collected on the socio-economic characteristics of commuting households (income, wages, modal choice, commuting expenditures, trip purpose, trip origin and destination, travel time, public transport service availability and car ownerships status) using questionnaire and review of documentary records. A combination of descriptive and inferential statistics was used for the analysis. The result shows that there is a general poor understanding and underestimation of immediate costs of private car use, such as travel time, stress, parking fees, insurance, depreciation, maintenance and repairs. The ignorance of real cost of car ownership and use explains the reason why though car ownership is lower in Nigeria than advanced countries, its rate of use is higher. Furthermore, the study shows that the values of commuting time in some Local Government Areas are higher than the hourly wage rate of the resident because of the relatively high commuting time, implying that commuters are not adequately compensated for commuting. On the whole the average commuting time of 1.26 hours, hourly wage rate of ₦1, 000 and commuting value of time ₦1, 260 is higher than hourly average wage rate by ₦260. The study recommended that the Lagos megacity planners should coordinate housing and transport policies by building affordable houses near existing planned public transport hubs or targeting transportation improvement on areas with large numbers of moderate-income workers with long and expensive commuting to workplace destinations. Finally, Policy strategies like parking charge, congestion pricing and fuel tax should be adopted to internalize the external cost of motor car usage as it is the case in Singapore and United Kingdom.