Railway authority should partner with security agencies and stop people hanging on train across the country.

Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, who gave the charge at the first Lagos Traffic Radio Lecture Series held in Lagos said he was terrified by the number of people he saw hanging on a moving train in Lagos.

Amaechi said it was the responsibility of government to protect lives of its citizenry, saying it would be better to allow passengers who could afford the transport fare to sit in the train than for them to lose their lives.

He said the process of migrating workforce and people who commute from one location, area, state to another for the purpose of engaging in employment was still very difficult in the country, saying government was making frantic effort to make transportation easy in the country.

According to him, in fact, as families migrate due to employment purposes, they are compelled to move with children who require transportation to attend schools, and where transportation is lacking, the level of distress for the working parents and children becomes increased.

Amaechi said as far as mass transportation was concerned, there was evidence to show that inadequacy in transport infrastructure and services had contributed significantly to the prevalence of poverty across various Nigerian communities in both urban and rural areas.

The Transport Minister said the problems of Nigerian transport system had varied across various sub-sectors including air, water, rail and road transport, urging Lagos State government to make its policy on water transportation known to the Federal Government before it considers numerous proposals from the private sector operators.

He also said the Lagos –Ibadan railway line which is part of the Lagos- Kano railway line would be completed with two and half years, saying the Lagos –Port Harcourt Calabar railway line would be ready within two and half years

Also, Commissioner for Transportation, Dayo Mobereola in his paper title ‘Exploring Transportation Beyond Roads, said the strategic transport master plan conceived by Lagos Government to address the various issues within the sector proposes to push the share of rail transportation to twenty-one percent.

Mobereola said the last three years efforts had been directed at establishing a bus route network that would service the state, saying Lagos needs four hundred and fifty bus routes, twenty thousand buses to service ten million passenger trips happening daily.

He while explaining the strategic Transport Master Plan, said the aim was to develop a fully integrated mass rapid transit system to cover the activity centers within the megacity region.

Mobereola said six rail lines, one mono rail line fourteen BRT routes, three cable car projects and over twenty water routes were to be developed with implementation strategies being traffic management, ensuring an efficient public transport and transport integration.

The Transportation Commissioner, who further stressed the benefit of the plan to include carbon emission reduction of eight million tons per annum, also said eighty percent of transport journeys would be completed within sixty minutes when plan comes fully on stream.

He also stated that government would continue to promote water transportation by undertaking the dredging of waterways along the twenty-six water routes that had been identified.