Traversing Brazil’s biggest city gets a bit easier

Mar 31st 2012 | SÃO PAULO | from the print edition

The abiding memory from many a business trip to São Paulo is of traffic jams. But South America’s biggest city now offers a new way to nip between meetings. Line 4 of the city’s metro, opened in stages over the past two years, links several business districts—the city centre, Avenida Paulista and Faria Lima—for the first time. This would hardly be worthy of remark in other international cities. But São Paulo’s 71km (44 miles) metro network is tiny for a city of 19m. Mexico City’s metro is more than 200km long; Seoul’s is nearly 400km. Even Santiago, a city one quarter the size of São Paulo, has a metro that is 40% bigger.

Unsurprisingly, demand on Line 4 is overwhelming. It already carries 550,000 passengers a day and expects 1m once it is complete. Rush hour is alarming. But despite the crush, refugees from the jams above are ecstatic. The line has cut many commuters’ journeys from the city’s poor periphery by half an hour. It is all the rage to start business meetings by gloating over your speedy arrival.
São Paulo’s first metro lines were built in the 1970s by the federal government. But the constitution of 1988 handed urban transport to states and cities, which had less money and no experience of such projects. Years without investment or maintenance followed.

Line 4’s second phase, given the go-ahead on March 24th by the state governor, Geraldo Alckmin, will add five more stations and 1.8 billion reais ($1 billion) to the 3.8 billion reais already spent. Despite such price tags, more metro lines are essential, says Carlos Carvalho of IPEA, a government-linked think-tank. Nothing else can carry the 60,000-70,000 passengers per hour demanded on São Paulo’s busiest routes. Some are being planned, but they will take years: ground was broken on Line 4 in 2004. Quicker, cheaper projects are also needed, he says: upgrades to existing lines and suburban trains, plus lots more dedicated bus corridors, and perhaps congestion-charging too.

Recent economic growth, and hosting the football World Cup in 2014, have put urban transport back on the federal government’s agenda. But it will be 2016 before much improvement is felt in São Paulo, says Jaime Waisman of the University of São Paulo—and only then if the federal government chips in with grants, not just cheap loans. Even with federal help, clearing the backlog of projects will take private money. São Paulo has made a start: Line 4’s rolling stock and signalling come from ViaQuatro, a private-sector consortium, which will operate the driverless trains for the next 30 years.
Until now, richer Paulistas have shunned the metro. Last year a residents’ group in Higienópolis, an elegant district, said they did not want Line 6 to stop there, fearing it would bring “a different class of person”. That caused uproar. Line 4 will soon stop close by. Its air-conditioned trains, mobile-phone signal and business-friendly route may even persuade them to abandon their cars.

The Economist