Getting this to work involves more than just mobility. Curitiba has successfully used a relatively cheap surface public-transport system to transform the city, not just in terms of the movement of people, but also in terms of how it uses land and public spaces. Integration has been achieved by connecting people, and this has been key to the city’s economic progress.
Back in 1966, when the city was drawing up a master plan, they looked at models from France and the UK, among others. But the cost of an underground was deemed prohibitive for the city, despite its agricultural-based wealth. So they opted for a surface transport system with dedicated bus lanes, which was about a 10th of the cost of an underground railway.
When the system was first implemented in 1974, it moved just 50 000 passengers annually. Today, the BRT carries 1.7 million people a day over a network of 85.6 kilometres, along six lines with an operating fleet of 1 368 buses, some capable of carrying 250 passengers, and pausing at 6 500 stops. The buses drive 328 kilometres each day and are supplied and run by private companies, which are paid by the kilometre. Passengers pay a standard fare of just under a dollar regardless of the length of the journey. This fee cross-subsidises those, mostly the poor, who live farther out from the city centre.
Jaime Lerner has been a pivotal figure in this system. He was part of the original team that decided on the winning bid for the city’s master plan and, in 1965, helped create the Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano de Curitiba (Curitiba Institute of Urban Planning and Research – IPPUC), a research, monitoring and implementation body funded by the municipality.
Lerner was elected mayor three times, the first in 1971. Although he implemented a number of important changes in the city, including establishing more parks, creating an apprenticeship system for deprived young people, and launching a successful recycling scheme, the BRT remains his greatest achievement, and Curitiba’s gift to the world.
‘You need to think of the BRT,’ he says, ‘not just as a transport system, but as a city design. It has been the engine of the city’s growth. We started small, but for each stage to solve each problem, we have used innovation.’
Not only have the number of lanes and buses increased exponentially, but the services have also radically improved. More than 90 per cent of the fleet is adapted for disabled users. Various feeder lines are fully integrated, with a range of bus types and sizes. Tubular stations improved the passenger experience. The three-lane systems of the BRT, the slow and fast car lanes, and staggered BRT alignment stations were introduced to reduce hold-ups. And now increasing numbers of buses use biofuel, while the electric and hybrid ‘Hibri-bus’ is imminent.
‘Everything in Brazil is dedicated to the car,’ says Lerner. ‘For example, there are at least 5 million cars in São Paulo alone, each car taking up 25 square metres of space on the road and in parking. This is the size of a small housing unit. Even if half of this was dedicated instead to housing, we could house another 2.5 million people closer to their place of work. But to do this, we have to provide public transport, to turn the space for cars from private to public.
‘Back in the 1970s, when we did it, it was said that every city which achieved a population of 1 million should have a subway. As we did not have the money, instead we asked: What is a subway? The answer was, it is a system that is fast and has good frequency, so you don’t have to wait. So, since we did not have the resources to go underground, we asked, “Why not the surface?” So we took the existing streets, and linked them to the structure of growth of the city – where we linked and integrated living, working, leisure and mobility.’
‘This is why Curitiba,’ he notes, ‘is different. It involved the renovation and evolution of the existing system.’
The BRT has resulted in an estimated reduction of about 27 million car trips annually. Given such efficiencies, Curitiba’s growth has been above 7 per cent over the last three decades, while per capita income is 30 per cent higher than the national average. Ironically, Curitiba is now the second largest producer of cars in Brazil, and also has a lively services and high-tech sector.
Curitiba has been able to make dramatic inroads into the perennial and similar challenges facing Brazil’s cities: transport, governance, infrastructure and security. Yet remarkably few other Brazilian cities have sought to emulate its success. The reason, says Lerner, is very simple: politics. The problem, he believes, is that ‘decisions today are closely tied to having consensus, but democracy is not consensus, rather conflict wisely managed’. Rather than attempting a perfect solution, which will take time, if not for ever, to be implemented, there is a need for pragmatism: ‘Improvement needs a start. You need to have a demonstration effect sometimes to get things moving.’
A key reason for Curitiba’s comparative success has been consistency in planning and implementation.
Daniele Moraes is an architect at the IPPUC. She reminds us that the 1965 master plan was not the first in Curitiba’s history. The first city plan was produced in 1853, which was followed 90 years later by the Agache Plan, which laid out a high-density city centre with suburbs radiating outwards – the design trend of the time – for the population of 180 000. The winning bid for the 1965 plan, by which time the city had 500 000 inhabitants, built on the Agache scheme but focused on a combination of land use, roads and public transport to deliver a better environment, and social and economic development. Since then there have been two further revisions, in 2004 and 2014.
It has not just been about plans, but continuity in terms of people as well, explains Moraes. She points out that ‘Curitiba has enjoyed six mayoral terms – 24 years – of mayors from IPPUC. Jaime Lerner, who served for three terms, Rafael Greca, who still works at IPPUC, and Cassio Taniguchi, who served two terms. They were all also from the same political group which ran the municipality for 40 years.’ She adds, ‘Jaime Lerner was a shrewd politician and diplomat. He taught children about recycling, for example, and in so doing created a whole generation concerned about urban planning and the environment. He created a lot of support for change.’
Critical mass is important too. A municipal-funded institution, the IPPUC has a staff of 160, of whom half are architects and engineers.
Of course, there are challenges. Noted local economist Carlos Guimaraes of FESP (the São Paulo School of Engineering), a private Brazilian university with a focus on commerce, observes that there is a difference between the IPPUC team and the ‘professors now in City Hall who are very theoretical about things, but they don’t know how to make them happen’. And there are always funding shortages, reminds his colleague Luis Fernando Ferreira da Costa because Brazil remains a very centralised country. ‘Taxes go from the cities to the states to the federal centre, but the amount that comes back depends partly on politics. It also reflects the size of the federal government: everyone in Brazil wants to work for the government. We need greater decentralisation and greater autonomy, like the United States, so that the states can raise and spend their own taxes.’ Cape Town is not alone.
‘Solving problems,’ Lerner notes, ‘is not related to scale, or the size of the city, or financial resources. The challenge is in organisation, and in creating shared responsibility between citizens and government, and the public and private sectors. Otherwise you won’t get the outcome you need.’
Curitiba’s success has been exported worldwide, including to towns in Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa and Morocco. Oscar Edmundo Diaz worked to implement the TransMilenio BRT system in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, together with Mayor Enrique Peñalosa. The system started in 2000 with two corridors, 400 000 passengers and four private operators. By 2016 it had expanded to 12 routes, 2.5 million passengers and 10 operators. Some routes were carrying 52 000 passengers per hour in each direction, equivalent to the most efficient metros in the world. But this is still deemed insufficient for a city of 9 million, and reflects challenges, too, in opening up more routes.
Peñalosa returned to office after a 14-year absence in 2015. One of his challenges was to meet the 2015 target of 366 kilometres of corridors on the network and to ensure that 85 per cent of the population live within 1 kilometre of a mass transport system by 2030. Diaz also