A Daily Flow Profile of Traffic in an Urban Traffic Corridor: The Nigerian Experience

In the commercial city of Lagos, Nigeria, traffic congestion poses a great challenge to commuters, particularly businessmen and workers that need to keep appointments and report in offices timely. A great amount of productive man-hours is therefore wasted in traffic congestion. This coupled with the psychological stress, and the loss of potential income that commuters experience in traffic jams present a frustrating scenario to those affected. As a result, traffic managers are motivated to understand traffic information through data generated from vehicle counts as a means of guiding road users on how to avoid traffic jams in routes. This is an urban traffic corridors problem, which plays an important role in urban traffic network analysis. Unfortunately, till date, there is sparse documented information on urban traffic corridors relevant to Lagos, Nigeria. In this paper, through the application of the screen line traffic count methodology, we investigate the daily flow profile of traffic.