Research Challenges for Nigerian Road Transportation Sector in Covid-19 Pandemic Era

The COVID-19 pandemic created an enormous disruption to the everyday life of the modern society. Among the various urban systems, transportation services were among those that suffered the most significant impacts, particularly severe in the case of urban transportation and highways. Using the Nigerian experience in the COVID-19 era, it is seen that a lot of city/urban and even rural challenges have to do with coping with peak hour traffic periods when workers have to go to work and student/school children commuting to school, and later return to their homes. With COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing consequences, mass transportation is actually the main barrier for students and workers dependent on transport to go back to their daily routines with comfort and safety. It is implied that the objective of a good research would be to determine a demand control able to equalize the number of passengers in each car but respecting the COVID-19 social distancing protocols with the number of passengers in each time-of-day range being combined into suitable predictive models that include independent variables related to passenger’s behavior so that almost 90% of all passengers are follow very strict and straight daily routine that can be coordinated and scheduled creating enough time space one from the other to avoid undesirable concentrations inside buses and bus stops.

Keywords:COVID-19; Pandemic; Transport services; Lockdown; Restriction; Impacting; Social distance protocols; Dynamic changes; Efficiency; Predictive models; Independent variables; Passenger behaviour