Online doctoral seminar 1: "The Politics of a Bus Corridor: a study of the Lagos Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) implementation" with Fatoumata Diallo

Around the world and specifically in the global South, a growing number of cities face major transport challenges due to increasing congestion levels, inadequate or insufficient collective transport capacities and an urban population on the rise. Among the numerous solutions available to them to tackle these pressing issues, many cities have opted for Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) policies in the past decades. These bus network, known to be cheap and quick-to-implement transport solutions, originally earned their popularity in South America before travelling to all continents from the early 2000s onwards. The Lagos State Government launched the very first network of the kind in sub-Saharan Africa in 2008 and the policy has faced numerous challenges from its formulation to its implementation, hailed by some for its quick delivery and despised by others for its decreasing levels of service.

In the framework of her comparative research project on BRT networks, PhD candidate Fatoumata Diallo has conducted fieldwork in Lagos. During this online seminar, she will retrace the history of the Lagos BRT-Lite, question the policy’s underlying political goals and go over the major hiccups it has encountered. As 2020 marks the 12th year of operations, the seminar questions how transport policies imported from other contexts meddle in local realities, paying a particular attention to the political stakes attached to urban megaprojects.

Image credit: Independent

 After a short presentation of fer thesis topic, approach, methods and first findings, there was room for participants interested in that topic, to discuss the findings and analysis, as well as to give them some constructive feedbacks for the project.