All over the world, one critical objective of public transportation is facilitating the
movement of people and goods from one place to another. In Benue state of Nigeria, the
Benue Links was established in February, 1988 to address the problem of public transport
occasioned by the effect of the Structural Adjustment Programme on the transport sector.
These problems include; vehicle breakdown, old vehicles plying the road, irregular
changes on luggages, unnecessary delays, e.t.c.
The study thus set out to answer the following questions; How satisfactory is the
services of Benue Links to its passengers? Is the links meeting the objectives for which it
was set up? And what could be done to resolve the company’s numerous problems. The
study’s objectives is to find answers to these questions is to determine if the transport
needs of the state is being solved or not. And to examine whether the passengers have
any complaints about the services of the links.
Both secondary and primary sources of data was explored to test the hypothesis
which states that; the level of services of the links is not affected by the level of
patronage by passengers. The systematic sampling technique was adopted to generate
data from the population. A total of 285 questionnaire was analyzed and used to test the
hypothesis in the study.
The research findings shows that most of respondents or passengers earn below
N5,000.00 monthly, the services of the BLNL does not cover most of the towns and
villages in the state and the passengers are often not refunded their fares in the case of
vehicle breakdown amongst others.
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On the above findings, the study recommends as follows; BLNL should operate
some form of freight services to enable passengers convey bulky goods, purchasing
additional buses/vehicles to compliment existing ones, repairing vehicles that have
broken down, maximizing passengers comfort, e.t.c.