Traffic

Motorbikes are everywhere. They always carry at least two people, sometime up to four. The passengers carry all manner of things – gasoline in 25L containers; a rolled up tin roof; a stack of chairs. Women also carry enormous trays of bananas and bundles of sticks balanced on their heads.

People walk along the side of the roads as there are no sidewalks. There are also no traffic laws that I can discern and no traffic lights and few stop signs.

The traffic tends to organize into cars in the middle, motorbikes closer to the outside, and then pedestrians on the edge of the road. There are no lanes. People drive on the right and traffic flows in two directions, but beyond that it is chaos. There may be two cars, two motorbikes and a few people occupying what would be two lanes in the U.S. As you inch forward, this might change to one car and three or four motorbikes and then to three cars and two motorbikes as everyone vies for a place on the road.

It is amazing that there are not more accidents. We were only in one the entire time that we were in Nigeria. This was in Lagos where our driver scraped another car. Both drivers looked at each other and acknowledged with a look or a nod and kept driving. Something so minor was obviously not worth stopping for.