BRAZIL: High Cost of Public Transport Aggravates Inequalities

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 16 2004 (IPS) - Wilson Minas, a 47-year-old Brazilian father of four, gets up at 4:00 AM for a nearly two-hour commute in three different buses to make it to his job in a middle-class neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro.

His transport costs equal his salary: 400 reals (138 dollars) a month.

The only reason he can afford to make the long trek from his low-income neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city is because he receives transport vouchers, thanks to a law dating to the 1980s that obligates companies to pay the commuting costs of their employees.

The administration of the building where Minas works as a janitor pays him 340 reals (117 dollars) a month in transport vouchers, to which he adds part of his salary to travel in mini-buses, which cost four reals (1.38 dollars), but are faster and more comfortable than regular buses or trains, whose ticket prices are between 46 and 58 cents.

Minas lives in Queimados, a Rio de Janeiro dormitory suburb, since that was the only place he could afford a plot on which to build a modest home, and because ”the government helps finance the construction of housing only in outlying areas.”

”And I can’t afford to pay rent on my salary,” he explained.

Minas prefers to live in the distant suburb, where ”there are no thieves, and the kids can play freely, with the door open.” He gave up on living in a ‘favela’ or shantytown near the centre of Rio de Janeiro, due to ”the drug trafficking violence.”

Despite the challenge of a nearly four-hour round-trip commute, Minas is one of the privileged among Brazil’s poor, because he has a steady formal sector job that also covers the cost of public transport.

The high cost of urban transport is one of the biggest factors of inequality and aggravation of poverty in the metropolitan areas of Brazil, according to a study by the Institute of Development and Information in Transportation (ITRANS), released Thursday in Brasilia, the capital.

The study, ‘Mobility and Poverty’, surveyed workers who earn less than three minimum monthly salaries (the equivalent of 248 dollars), a category that includes 45 percent of the urban population of this country of nearly 180 million.

The study focused on people in the metropolitan regions of Sao Paulo (Brazil’s largest city), Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and Recife.

Transportation has become an insurmountable obstacle standing in the way of employment for the poor, Mauricio Cadaval, president of ITRANS, told IPS.

The unemployed poor tend to live in outlying neighbourhoods located far from the areas where jobs are available, and they are unable to afford taking public transport to look for work.

Furthermore, companies do not generally hire applicants who live on the outskirts of the city and would need to take more than one bus or train to get to their job, because that would drive up the cost of the vouchers they would have to be given, he explained.

The public transport problem swells the ranks of those who are too discouraged to look for work anymore, and are not even counted among the unemployed.

If there were affordable public transit, said Cadaval, the official unemployment statistics would be much higher than the current 12 percent, because more people would be able to continue looking for work, and would figure as unemployed.

The transport voucher, created to benefit the working poor, thus has a perverse effect. To avoid additional costs, employers refuse to hire precisely those who, due to poverty, must live in more distant neighbourhoods and would have to take combinations of buses, subways and trains to get to their jobs.

Between 62.9 and 76.8 percent of poor Brazilians who use mass transit in the four metropolitan regions studied receive no vouchers or assistance with their commuting costs, according to the ITRANS study.

The transport vouchers have thus ”lost their focus” and no longer live up to the objective of fighting social inequality, of which Brazil is the world champion, said Cadaval. Brazil has the largest gap between rich and poor in Latin America, which in turn is the region with the most unequal distribution of income in the world.

A large part of the transport vouchers are actually issued to employees who earn good salaries and drive their own cars to work. They then sell their vouchers to intermediaries, who resell them to users of the mass transit system, creating a black market business whose profits come from the poor, according to ITRANS.

Meanwhile, walking, sometimes several hours a day, has increasingly become the only option for the poorest of the poor, and for unemployed job-seekers, those who work in the informal economy, or workers who earn very low wages. Some people walk dozens of kilometres a day, ”which takes a tremendous physical toll,” said Cadaval.

The study did, however, come across at least one positive development. The growing number of schools and health care centres in impoverished outlying suburbs has given the poor access to education and health services without having to pay for transportation.

But other statistics, like the huge drop in mass transit-users over the weekend, indicate that the residents of poor neighbourhoods renounce recreational activities due to the high cost of buses and other means of locomotion, added the expert.

The aim of the ITRANS study is to serve as a ”wake-up call” for Brazil’s government and civil society leaders regarding this neglected aspect, considered ”one of the dimensions of poverty” along with education, health, housing and food, and to help contribute to the development of new policies, said Cadaval.