San Francisco Bike Blog

When I heard Brazil was getting the 2014 World Cup (I’m a soccer nut, as well as a bike nut) - I thought, “Hmmm…every other World Cup means new transportation gets built like crazy.” I wanted to find out what was popping down in Pelé’s homeland with respect to transportation issues - having been to several World Cups, I knew they could stress even the best of mass transit systems. So I started Googling.

I read about a metro - a subway - a rail-based alternative to, or addition to, the famed Curitiba BRT - the Rede Integrada de Transporte. But I couldn’t find any more info on it. Until I stumbled onto this post by The Overhead Wire.

The Overhead Wire points us to a pretty incredible New York Times Magazine article on Curitiba and Jaime Lerner - the creator of Curitiba’s BRT. In the May 2007 article (a year and a half ago), we learn that the BRT down there is indeed having trouble:

Unfortunately, the trends of bus usage are down. While the system has expanded to cover 13 of the cities in the metropolitan region, charging a flat fare that in practice subsidizes the trips of the mostly poorer workers who live in outlying areas, bus ridership within the Curitiba municipality has been declining. “We are losing bus passengers and gaining cars,” says Luis Fragomeni, a Curitiba urban planner. He observes that, like potential users of public transport everywhere, many Curitibanos view it as noisy, crowded and unsafe. Undermining the thinking behind the master plan, even those who live alongside the high-density rapid-bus corridors are buying cars. “The licensing of cars in Curitiba is 2.5 times higher than babies being born in Curitiba,” he says. “Trouble.” Because cars are status symbols, attempts to discourage people from buying them are probably futile. “We say, ‘Have your own car, but keep it in the garage and use it only on weekends,’ ” Fragomeni remarks. And the public-transport system must be upgraded continuously to remain an appealing alternative to private vehicles. “That competition is very hard,” says Paulo Schmidt, the president of URBS, the rapid-bus system. During peak hours, buses on the main routes are already arriving at almost 30-second intervals; any more buses, and they would back up. While acknowledging his iconoclasm in questioning the sufficiency of Curitiba’s trademark bus network, Schmidt nevertheless says a light-rail system is needed to complement it.

What all did we learn in this one quick paragraph?

1. The BRT is so unappealing that even people who live right next to the stations feel compelled to get and drive their own private cars. Having a private car in America is a status symbol, too, but if you have real mass transit - rail - you might be able to convince yourself to go without a car.
2. Constant upgrading of the BRT is necessary to keep it in contention with private cars for usage (the BRT, as stated, is losing this battle).
3. The BRT cannot handle the peak-hour load. This led to my earlier comment that ‘even when BRTs succeed, they fail.’
4. The 30-second gaps between buses during peak-hour load - presumably that gap is sometimes shorter and sometimes longer - will create that wonderful ‘highway within a highway’ effect that I’m always talking about. This effect will let pedestrians know, if they were at all unclear on the concept, that San Francisco now belongs to cars and buses - not pedestrians, not bicyclists, nor anyone or anything else.
5. A light rail system (possibly an ‘underground rail’ or ’subway’ system) is going to be built to keep Curitiba running. I would suggest that cities looking at BRT now look to build expanded capacity into the system, so they can handle future needs - and that means they should build light rail, not BRT.

But that’s not all we learn from this article. Speaking of the difficulty of getting everyone to recycle, reporter Arthur Lubow writes about the nature of Lerner’s BRT-creating days:

Like other left-wing critics, Urban traces the lack of participation to an original sin. The progressive urban planning of Curitiba was not initiated by a democratic process; it was set in motion by the military dictatorship that seized power in 1964 and ruled Brazil until the mid-’80s. Its environmentalism is rooted in authoritarianism. “They didn’t have to confront the public through public participation, and the decisions could be made by urban planners — architects acting as politicians,” says Clara Irazábal, who has written a book comparing the urban planning experiences of Curitiba and Portland, Ore. The city that has been called the most forward-looking in the Western Hemisphere is an outgrowth of an era that many Brazilians prefer not to look back on. Jaime Lerner, the archangel of the Curitiba green movement, was anointed by the dragons of war.

…

When I would ask people if they thought Lerner could have accomplished his reforms under a democracy, people sympathetic to both Lerner and the military (like Rischbieter) or critical of both (like [Teresa Urban, a local journalist and environmental activist]) would say no; but most, professing admiration for Lerner but distaste for the military, said the dictatorship was not a precondition for his success.

OK, so what did we learn here?

Well, most people seem to agree that building this BRT monstrosity in Curitiba - the home of the BRT concept - required a dictatorship, because a democratic society would never allow it to go through - at least, not the citizens of Curitiba, in considering that particular plan, at that particular time.

What does that mean for San Francisco?

Perhaps not much, but my first impression is, ‘Wow - you mean not everybody loved BRT at the time it was created? There were people who were even against BRT all the way back in the day? And some of these people probably saw the long-term consequences of building BRT instead of light rail, and knew that it was a bad deal?’

This is important because it means that BRT was never vetted by the public in Curitiba. I would argue that it has also not been sufficiently vetted in San Francisco, either - nor in most of the United States. Most of us citizens are operating totally in the dark, and it’s a very bad situation. Once a mass transit system is up and running, it is very difficult to pull it down and replace it with something else, so you really only have one chance to vet an idea for a mass transit system - before it is built.

Unlike Curitiba under military dictatorship, San Francisco has a say, however small, in how transportation projects are carried out in this town - our town. For all of the built-in inequality of our system, enough public opposition to these BRT schemes could surely improve, and if necessary, derail them. The BRT they’re building in Rio may get dedicated, physically-separated bike paths in both directions if bike folks keep up the pressure. The 70-mile Sonoma-Marin Area Rapid Transit (SMART) light rail line will have a dedicated bike/walk path running parallel to the train line - the bike/walk folks had to fight for that. We should demand the same for any mass transit project in our town.

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