Article updated: 10/1/2012 9:55 AM

In Nigerian mega-city, gridlock is a great unifier

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Traffic backs up along a busy road in Lagos, Nigeria. In the metropolis of 17.5 million, the traffic jams that Nigerians call "go-slows" can strike at any moment. Here, drivers are hostage to a road network that hasn't been upgraded since the 1970s.

Associated Press

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The traffic begins long before dawn in Nigeria's largest city. The poor crowd onto benches welded inside dented, clattering buses. The middle classes sit behind the steering wheels of used imports. As the first sunbeams cut through the exhaust fumes, the wealthy thumb tablet computers in cars with blaring sirens, chauffeured by moonlighting policemen. They will almost certainly end up jumbled together in one of the epic traffic jams which, if nothing else, serve to bridge the class divide in this metropolis of 17.5 million.