Car free stories from across the globe: spotlight on Curitiba
Curitiba is one of the cities featured in our Car Free Stories Map, which celebrates the many cities taking bold action to get cars off the road. In this blogpost, we take a closer look at Brazil’s ‘ecological capital’, where the bus handles the fuss.
Curitiba is a major city in the south of Brazil, capital of the state of Paraná, but is somewhat overshadowed by its relatively nearby and heavily car-congested neighbour to the north, São Paulo. On a bad day in São Paulo traffic tailbacks can add up to an astonishing 295km long, or about three quarters of the 400km distance between the cities.
But living in the fume filled shadow of its neighbour, to some extent Curitiba’s striking achievements at avoiding car dependence have been overlooked.
Sitting on a plateau, Curitiba is relatively flat but surrounded by mountains. It’s about one kilometre above sea level, has a subtropical, rainy climate, and was prone to flooding. Nineteenth-century Portuguese maps show early European attempts at urban planning, with roads mostly laid out according to a tidy right-angled grid.
When the modern city started to expand rapidly it did something very different in planning terms, ignoring the fashion in other expanding urban areas. Instead of carving large wide roads through its centre, it decided to develop 'pedestrian areas'. And, to deal with its propensity to flood, instead of enclosing waterways in concrete culverts and canals, it designated parks to allow for natural flooding and drainage. Additionally, with its extensive tree-planting scheme it has been called ‘ecological capital of Brazil’. Over four decades from 1970 to 2010, the amount of green space per person rose from less than one square metre, to 52 square metres.
But one of the greatest challenges for the growing urban area was how people were to move around. An industrial zone for non-heavy industry known as the Cidade Industrial de Curitiba was developed outside the city in 1973 to attract business and with it came more workers and more people commuting in and out of the city centre.
Before the 1960s Curitiba had looked set to follow countless other cities and embrace car culture, ‘planning for the full motorization of the city’. The car industry itself was seen as a possibility for the economic future of the city. Had that plan become a reality, Curitiba would have ended up with many of its historic buildings and neighbourhoods flattened to make way for French ‘Hausmann’-style wide, radial road networks, and with levels of traffic congestion familiar in other Latina American cities, like its neighbour São Paulo.
But, instead, responding to the city’s growth pains indicated by overcrowding and congestion in the 1960s, local leaders launched a competition to re-imagine Curitiba’s development path. That led, in 1965, to a new master plan which would ‘remove cars from the equation’. That meant removing them from the historic core of the city and its downtown area and included initiatives and the greening of the city that were achieved with substantial citizen participation. Mass transit was also posited as a way to replace the use of the ‘low-occupancy vehicles’ that were increasingly clogging streets.
But what would the new system look like? One option considered was an underground metro system. But such an approach would have been both slow and expensive.
Curitiba’s solution was, instead, to develop a low cost, fully-integrated and rapid bus system, whose raised, metro-like stops and stations would later become iconic.
Dedicated bus lanes were introduced in 1974 (far cheaper than tunnelling under the city), in 1980 terminals that worked like underground stations were added, and in 1991, to make the system more attractive and comfortable for passengers, distinctive tube-like raised platforms were also introduced. Some of the most eye-catching vehicles are double-articulated buses capable of carrying up to 270 passengers.
Over time, a flat fare system was introduced so that there were no barriers for poorer passengers or those who had to travel further into the city. This also introduced a simplicity that improved operations, cut the amount of transaction time, as well as reducing costs and potential confusion.
Different city areas had their own bus companies, to improve overall coordination and avoid potentially wasteful competition a system of revenue sharing was brought in.
The practical, integrated and accessible bus network achieved one of the great goals of the transition towards more sustainable ways of moving around - a modal shift from car use to more efficient, less dangerous and less polluting mass transit by bus. By 1991 an estimated 27 million trips by car had been eliminated, and 28 percent of previous car users had switched to using the bus.
By 1993 the Bus Rapid Transport System (BRT) was carrying 1.5 million passengers per day. It has been replicated around the world: from cities in the United States to South Africa to China to Latin America, such as Bogotá in Colombia, a city with a population of 8 million people.
Today the Curitiba BRT system works across eight neighbouring cities, moving 1.9 million passengers around each day, and reportedly enjoys an 89% approval rating. Researchers at the University of California summarised the situation:
‘This shift towards buses has decreased congestion on the streets, reduced travelling times, and increased accessibility, with these changes the city has been able to create more pedestrian areas making it much more convenient for the public to use and move around.’
But pressures from growth and problems have not gone away. In the last two decades, traffic congestion has been obstructing public transport. To help deal with that there is now more active promotion of cycling designed to be integrated with the bus system, as well as using land adjacent to the city's few rail lines. In 2013 a cycling plan was introduced which was designed to upgrade an existing 100km of cycle paths and introduce 200km more, as well as including bike parks at all bus terminals and city parks, while expanding bike networks to include the industrial zone.
Curitiba’s example gives two key lessons, one is the importance of integrated long-term planning of infrastructure that puts the needs of people first, and the other is that because no system is perfect, and new problems always arise, cities have to be ready to keep innovating and improving.