Think L.A. Is Bad? In Brazil, Gridlock Can Span 100 Miles

A summer downpour had once again flooded the riverside highway, and Yvette Piha sat stuck in a 60-mile-long traffic jam. For 15 hours. “For the first time, I realized what a fragile giant Sao Paulo is,” said Piha, a psychologist at the University of Sao Paulo.

For his part, Wellington Gaspar turns up the Vivaldi on his car radio and settles in for the 1 1/2-mile drive down skyscraper-lined Avenida Paulista. It takes him more than 60 minutes--and he doesn’t even go during rush hour.

“This happens practically every day, so I’m used to it,” the insurance salesman says. “The trick is to sit back and relax.”

Sao Paulo, whose 10 million people make it South America’s largest metropolis, is strangling on its own size. Other big cities across the continent aren’t far behind. Decades of haphazard growth and little or no urban planning have caught up with the region’s newly emerging economies. Today, too many cars compete for too little space.

In the Peruvian capital of Lima, a city of 6.5 million, the number of cars soared when the government relaxed import restrictions in the early ‘90s. By 1995, there were 47,000 commuter vans plying the city’s streets--up from 6,000 three years earlier.

In Colombia, the 7 million residents of Bogota have no subway and commute by bus, taxi and car. With lower import tariffs, the number of cars has risen 12%, but the road system didn’t grow accordingly. As a result, a trip across town can take three hours during rush hour.

The glut of cars in Bogota is aggravated by aggressive and badly trained drivers, poorly laid-out roads and uncoordinated traffic lights.

“The long-term decisions that should have been made long ago have not been made,” says Alvaro Pachon, owner of a transportation consulting firm and head of the economics department at Bogota’s Javeriana University.

In Brazil, Sao Paulo is a synonym for nightmare traffic.

On weekdays, more than 3 million vehicles clog Sao Paulo’s 10,000 miles of roadways, and 600 new cars hit the streets each day.

The city’s Traffic Engineering Department calculates that in morning and evening rush hours, traffic jams across the city average 53 miles in length--when everything is working normally. A heavy rain, car breakdown or road detour can cause chaos.

That’s what happened June 3, when a 6-inch crack appeared in a concrete bridge that crosses the Tiete River and the riverside drive. Traffic under the bridge was blocked, and within hours a traffic jam nearly 100 miles long formed. It paralyzed the city for nearly 10 hours.

“Sao Paulo is on the verge of a collapse,” says Candido Malta Campos, an urban planner at the University of Sao Paulo.

Campos estimates traffic jams cost the city--Brazil’s business and financial center--more than $9 billion a year.

“Employee productivity drops, businessmen arrive late--or not at all--for their appointments, and merchandise is delivered behind schedule,” he says.

Traffic has worsened with the success of a 1994 anti-inflation plan that allowed many lower-class Brazilians to buy a car for the first time. Since then, the number of cars in Sao Paulo has jumped more than 12%.

But the problem had been simmering for almost 30 years, as city officials failed to deal with Sao Paulo’s growing needs.

The last comprehensive city plan was drawn up in 1968, Campos says. It stipulated that by the time Sao Paulo’s population reached 10 million, the city should have five subway lines covering 62 miles plus 84 miles of U.S.-style, restricted-access freeways.

Since the plan was adopted, not a single freeway has been built. And there are only two subway lines just 27 miles long, which are used by about 2.5 million people a day.

Venezuelans suffer from the same lack of action. In 1985, authorities tried to draw up a traffic control plan for Caracas, the capital, but gave up because they couldn’t agree on what had to be done, says Angela Di Domenico of Venezuela’s Environmental Ministry.

The result is chronic traffic jams in a city where gasoline is among the cheapest in the world and people use cars even for one-block trips to the bakery or newsstand.

The Sao Paulo Planning Department claims that there is not enough money in the budget to fix transit problems, but Campos, the urban planner, calls that “nonsense.”

“The money is there,” he says. “The problem is that it is being spent on grandiose vote-getting projects that unfortunately still dazzle the voter.”

Campos cites the city government’s decision to spend $1.1 billion to build a tunnel used by only 1,200 cars an hour at its busiest times.

“The money would have been enough to build a 20-kilometer [12-mile] subway line carrying 45,000 passengers an hour,” Campos says.

Traffic was slightly improved during a July-to-September pollution-control program that required motorists to leave cars at home one day a week. The system reduced the volume of cars by 600,000 a day and cut daily emissions of carbon monoxide by at least 550 tons.

Meanwhile, authorities are debating a new 18-page urban plan aimed at reducing traffic in Sao Paulo. It suggests locating residential buildings in banking and business districts and encouraging industries to move to low-income areas, where most of their work force lives.

Rising air pollution from car exhausts also helped remedy traffic problems--at least temporarily--in Chile. In Santiago, the capital, a pollution alert in August led authorities to order 60% of the city’s 350,000 vehicles off the streets.

Chile’s expertise with traffic problems prompted Colombia to invite four Chilean transit police officers to Bogota to run a six-month training program.

“The transit problem is not just a police problem,” said Col. Nelson Molina, one of the Chilean officers. “The entire population must get involved, and results are measured in the very long term.”