Lagos Underground

Yesterday's spoof on an imagined Monorail transit system for Monrovia, something I have had hanging around for years, reminded me of Jeremy Weate's 2007 remaining of the London Underground system. As seen in a six-year old post on the Naijablog, Weate took the famous tube map and simply replaced the station names with locations across Lagos.

As excerpted from that blogpost:

As with the London version, I have taken quite a few geographic/artistic licences for the purposes of design clarity and readability. My thinking is ppp: companies with deep pockets could sponsor the design & build of some of the stations to reduce the strain on the public purse, and in return pick the name of their choice (see Zenith, Silverbird, IBTC). On the other hand, some of the station names strongly signal a poetic sense of place, as with Palace (for the Oba’s Palace on Lagos Island), and 1004, standing for the eponymous flats. Again, for ease of use, I have left out the Five Cowrie Creek that separates Lagos Island from Victoria Island below it – those familiar with the morphology of Lagos can project it onto the map in their imagination.
What a joy Lagos would be with this metro system (it could be part overground, and part underground, depending on geology). As with the London version, I have kept a light rail system heading due East towards Ajah and Epe from the shared stations of Lekki/The Palms – this is it to cater for the marshy terrain along the Lekki peninsular.
Just imagine how convenient it would be if Lagos had this metro. The highbrow set could take the Falomo line (Piccadilly renamed) from their Bourdillon mansions to catch a classical music concert at Muson – at last not having to worry about parking and ‘settling’ awon boys; one could shop for a picnic at The Palms, then drink and eat it all on the new-look Bar Beach; or one could stock up on no-one-need-knowjuju fetish-wear at Oyingbo market before heading for the Silverbird cinema (connecting onto the Circle line at Kuramo Waters).

While this is all fun, as in my own case, would that we lived in a world where such public works projects were reality, rather than bloggers' graphic follies. More positively, a light-rail system is in the works for the urban area, supposedly set to open imminently, and various high-speed rail projects are advancing in Nigeria.