Commercial Motorcycle Patronage Pattern in Traditional Community, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

Abstract Movement is an essential attribute that sustains human existence and city development. The need for people to meet their daily economic need and overall urban development had made commuting and public transport system central to city growth. However, the deplorable state of the urban transportation system in Nigeria and the failure of the public transport system in meeting the transport demand of the people had made many people to embrace the commercial motorcycle mode as an alternative mode to fill the gap created by the public transport system. Hence, the study examined the extent to which commercial motorcycle is patronized in a traditional community like Ile-Ife in Nigeria. The data for this study were obtained through the administration of questionnaire on patrons. The administration of questionnaire was carried out on buildings along major motorcycle routes in Ile-Ife. Physical counting of buildings was carried out and a total of 1083 buildings were counted along these routes. One out of every ten building was selected from these buildings for sampling. A total of one hundred and eight (108) adult residents in the buildings were sampled for the study. Data obtained were analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics. The study found out that commercial motorcycle operation enjoys high patronage as 84.3% were found to be patronizing the transport mode. Reasons for non-patronage was found to include uncontrollable behavior of operators, alcoholic intake, overspeeding among others. Occupation and average monthly income were found to be significant at X2 = 38.586 and 26.494 and P = 0.017, 0.000 and 0.047 respectively when compared with patrons’ patronage pattern. The study concluded that the daily commercial motorcycle patronage pattern in Ile-Ife is influenced by the occupation, average expenditure on transport and average monthly income of patrons.