LASTMA Impounds 27 Vehicles Over ‘Violations’

The Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA) has impounded 27 vehicles over what it described as “grave violations” of safety rules. 

LASTMA said the move, aimed at curbing “pervasive and hazardous practice of vehicular overloading,” came after repeated warnings.

In a statement on Thursday, the agency’s Director, Public Affairs and Enlightenment Department, Adebayo Taofiq, said the “commercial and private vehicles found to be in flagrant breach of prescribed loading limits and established safety standards”.

“During an early-morning, coordinated enforcement exercise conducted after repeated warnings issued through multiple public sensitization platforms, the Agency impounded twenty-seven (27) commercial and private vehicles found to be in flagrant breach of prescribed loading limits and established safety standards,” Taofiq said.

The agency said there were “heightened concerns over the escalating risks posed by overloaded vehicles on major arterial corridors and densely trafficked inner-city routes,” thus the operation was carried out.

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Assessment by the agency showed a “deeply disconcerting pattern wherein motorists, particularly operators of commercial vehicles, indiscriminately burden their vehicles with assorted goods, including bulky items and perishable commodities, stored indiscriminately within luggage compartments and precariously mounted atop vehicle roofs”.

The traffic authority decried “unsafe practices,” saying they “grossly obstruct rearward visibility, destabilise vehicular balance and critically impair a driver’s situational awareness of approaching traffic, especially during overtaking manoeuvres, thereby substantially increasing the probability of avoidable road traffic collisions”.

LASTMA’s General Manager, Olalekan Bakare-Oki, said the overloading “constitutes a serious contravention of the State’s traffic laws and poses grave dangers not only to the occupants of the offending vehicles but also to other road users,” the statement read.

Describing the scenario as “an unsightly and perilous spectacle,” he decried the rampant overloading of commercial buses, private cars, and even articulated vehicles with goods and scrap metals in blatant disregard for public safety.