HABITAT-BRAZIL: A Tale of Transport in Two Cities

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 17 1996 (IPS) - Sao Paulo and Curitiba, two of the biggest cities in Brazil, are only 350 kms apart but they might as well be in different countries when comparing their policies on public transport policies and the effects on quality of life.

Nearly 2.5 million cars compete daily for space on the roads of Sao Paulo with 11,000 buses. A one-day stoppage by 8,000 metro workers caused traffic jams that stretched 153 kms when the 2.5 million people who normally travel to work on trains took to their cars.

Cantrasting with this chaotic panorama, Curitiba, capital of the southern state of Parana, is a comparitive transport utopia, with a system based entirely on efficient bus routes.

Of course Curitiba has 1.5 million as opposed to the 11 million in Sao Paulo but the key to transport efficiency really lies in the strategies taken. The capital of Parana also grew explosively, doubling in size since 1970, with the inevitable pressure on its services.

“Curitiba was lucky to have continuous urban planning,” said Mauro Jose Magnabosco, head of the Curitiba Institute of Urban Research and Planning (IPPUC), the source of mayors, plans and projects which gave the city its enviable quality of life.

Urban planning has been constructively applied in Curitiba for the past 24 years. It was initially backed by Jaime Lerner, three- times mayor and now provincial governor, and coherently maintained beyond the vagaries of political parties.

The bus was the preferred form of transport, though the system sought to incorporate the advantages of the metro.

The integrated network includes five “structural axes” or express lines, with “feeder” routes stretching into the suburbs. It means that 1,245 buses can move 1.8 million passengers around every day without problems – each vehicle transports an average of 1,445 passengers per day, nearly three times the corresponding figure for Sao Paulo.

In order to achieve this level of efficiency the exclusive bus lanes were multiplied, and interchange terminals were constructed along with the “tube-stations” where the passengers embark on the same level as the bus.

Everything is aimed to imitate the efficiency of the metro, with pre-paid tickets, swift change overs and clear roadways allowing for speed. From buses with a maximum capacity of 110 passengers the city expanded to articulated vehicles, for 170, and they have proposed “biarticulated” vehicles which could take up to 270 people.

The result is basically a surface level metro “with a cost a hundred times lower,” said Magnabosco.

The local governors also work on other fronts: they have created seven “citizens streets” in local neighbourhoods, decentralising public services to reduce pressure on the city centre.

Magnobosco has proposed launching an offensive against the individual car culture. He said the 530,000 cars in Curitiba circulate with an average of 1.3 passengers “which is very worrying.”

Roberto Moreira, an engineer and transport consultant said that unlike Curitiba, Sao Paulo never planned its transport system, and few of the city governments have made public transport a priority. The current mayor of Sao Paulo, Paulo Maluf, has launched projects for tunnels and viaducts to channel the road traffic, but in Moreira’s opinion this type of construction work “only transfers the bottlenecks from one place to another.”

No bus lanes have been designated to improve the circulation of the vehicles, and the metro, a transport system ideal for a city the size of Sao Paulo, totals a mere 43.6 km on its three lines, expanding at the rate of only two km per year. If the system continues to grow at its present rate, it will take 200 years to reach the near 400 km of metro lines in New York and London – both of a similar size.

Meanwhile, the suburban trains of Sao Paulo, another mass transport mechanism, are languishing in a state of abandonment, though they still move 1.2 million passengers daily.

Moreira said, without funding to extend the metro, the alternative is to improve the bus service in the way this has been done in Curitiba encouraging collective transport instead of cars.

Apart from suffering from the lack of planning and ten years of alternative left and right local governments, urban transport in Sao Paulo is also subject to occasional flooding.

Many of the main access routes of the transport system run along riverbanks and on low lying terrain, where heavy rains rapidly swell the waters, bringing the whole city to a halt.