By ENIOLA DABIRI

Lagos is a rapidly growing and bustling city where everyone daily focuses on varied pursuits. However, one significant issue that often gets overlooked is random and careless parking of vehicles. This problem impacts people’s daily activities in diverse ways. While this may seem like a minor inconvenience at first glance, its effects transcend the immediate frustration of finding a parking spot or the attendant gridlock.

This seemingly unharmful issue weaves into the fabric of daily lives, subtly disrupting the equilibrium and affecting everything from emergency response times to business growth and the effective implementation of government policies.

For instance, parking in an undesignated parking spot might seem harmless until the ripple effects begin to impact emergency response times (by causing delays), hinder business growth (by reducing accessibility), and complicate the implementation of government policies (by straining the limited available resources or complicating implementation).

Indiscriminate parking comes with attendant harsh and depressing implications on commuters and pedestrian movements. Since roads have suddenly become excessively narrow as a result of vehicles that are parked on either side, the safety of commuters and pedestrians become seriously compromised.

Many have lost their lives while jogging or walking along the road. No thanks to roadside parking! Consequently, many who would have loved to engage in walking for pleasure and fitness have to think twice before engaging in such a risky venture.

No matter how much energy is put into courting foreign and local investments, the enabling environment must, first and foremost, be created before such investment can thrive. Traffic gridlock is, no doubt, bad for business. And roadside parking is partly responsible for most of the traffic gridlock in Lagos.

There is, of course, also a huge implication for emergencies. Consider, for instance, a medical emergency where an ambulance, rushing an accident victim to the hospital, faces severe delays due to a gridlock caused by randomly parked vehicles. Such obstructions can exacerbate a patient’s condition.

This writer once watched a pregnant woman in labour rushed into the car by her desperate husband, hoping to quickly get her to the hospital. Sadly, this apparently simple task was complicated because of a few wrongly parked cars at the entrance of their house.

Perhaps more saddening is the fact that illegal parking hampers the swift intervention of first responders during emergencies. For instance, it makes it tougher for firefighters and other first responders to navigate their way through locations of fire disasters. This often results in valuable time lost, and sometimes needless loss of lives and properties.

It is, thus, clear that indiscriminate parking can encumber the operations of emergency workers, and worsen health conditions. Interestingly, nobody pays attention to the deadly but superficially harmless act of random parking as a major hindrance to smooth emergency operations.





https://www.vanguardngr.com/2025/03/lagos-and-the-menace-of-indiscriminate-parking/