C o m u n i c a ç ã o d e  C i ê n c i a  e  F é O   n   l   i   n    e MAIO DE 2007

It is often said of Curitiba that it doesn’t feel like Brazil. Depending on who’s speaking, that can be intended as a compliment or a criticism. Populated by European immigrants in the 19th century, Curitiba has a demographic makeup that is largely more fair-skinned and well educated than that of Brazil’s tropical north. It is also unusually affluent. Unlike São Paulo, with its startling extremes of wealth and poverty, much of Curitiba to an American eye looks familiarly middle class. Even the scruffy used-car lots have a seediness reminiscent of Los Angeles, not the Rio de Janeiro of “City of God.” The city, especially the large downtown, is very clean, thanks to municipal sanitation trucks and the freelance carrinheiros, or cart people, who pick up trash to sell at recycling centers.

Simon Norfolk for The New York Times
Curitiba’s rapid-transit buses can move 36,000 passengers an hour, a cheap alternative to a subway system.

Simon Norfolk for The New York Times
Despite its development as a city for
public transportation, Curitiba is said to
have more cars per capita than any other city in Brazil.

During my visit to Curitiba in March, the city was the host of an international biodiversity conference. While I hadn ’t known of it when I scheduled my trip, the coincidence was about as remarkable as finding a design show to greet you in Milan or a wine festival under way in Bordeaux. Environmentalism is the heart of Curitiba’s self-identity, and the municipal government is always devising new schemes that showcase the brand. The rest of the world has caught on, if not yet caught up. Ecological awareness is architecturally trendy. This year’s winner of the prestigious Pritzker Prize is Richard Rogers, a longtime proponent of mass transit, lower energy consumption and ecologically sensitive buildings. Commercially, real-estate developers from Beijing to Santa Monica are brandishing their LEED certificates (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) as they market condominiums and office suites to green-minded consumers. While it is unusually ambitious, the 25-year plan that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg proposed last month for New York is part of an international wave of recognition that cities must live more responsibly, especially when it comes to their effusions of climate-warming gases and their excretions of mountains of solid waste. Bloomberg’s most contentious idea — a “congestion tax” on cars entering traffic-clogged districts during peak hours — has been working for more than four years in London (and more than 30 years in Singapore) to increase the numbers of people using public transportation. Interestingly, Curitiba adopted an opposite approach, brandishing a carrot instead of a stick. The city planners suspected that public transportation would attract more users if it was more attractive. And that reasonable assumption turned out to be correct.

The efficient buses that zip across the Curitiba metropolitan region are the most conspicuously un-Brazilian feature of the city. Instead of descending into subway stations, Curitibanos file into ribbed glass tubes that are boarding platforms for the rapid-transit buses. (The glass tubes resemble the “fosteritos” that Norman Foster later designed for the metro in Bilbao, Spain.) Curitiba has five express-bus avenues, with a sixth in development, to allow you to traverse the city with speedy dispatch. In the early 1970s, most cities investing in public transportation were building subways or light-rail networks. Curitiba lacked the resources and the time to install a train system. Lerner says that compared with the Curitiba bus network, a light rail system would have required 20 times the financial investment; a subway would have cost 100 times as much. “We tried to understand, what is a subway?” he recalls. “It has to have speed, comfort, reliability and good frequency. But why does it have to be underground? Underground is very expensive. With dedicated lanes and not stopping on every corner, we could do it with buses.” Because widening the avenues would have required a lengthy and costly expropriation process, the planners came up with a “trinary” system that embraced three parallel thoroughfares: a large central avenue dedicated to two-way rapid-bus traffic (flanked by slow lanes for cars making short local trips) and, a block over on each side, an avenue for fast one-way automobile traffic.

When the bus system was inaugurated, it transported 54,000 passengers daily. That number has ballooned to 2.3 million, in large part because of innovations that permit passengers to board and exit rapidly. In 1992, Lerner and his team established the tubular boarding platforms with fare clerks and turnstiles, so that the mechanisms for paying and boarding are separated, as in a subway. To carry more people at a time, the city introduced flexible-hinged articulated buses that open their doors wide for rapid entry and egress; then, when the buses couldn’t cope with the demand, the Lerner team called for bi-articulated buses of 88 feet with two hinges (and a 270-passenger capacity), which Volvo manufactured at Curitiba’s request. Comparing the capacities of bus and subway systems, Lerner reels off numbers with a promoter’s panache. “A normal bus in a normal street conducts x passengers a day,” he told me. “With a dedicated lane, it can transport 2x a day. If you have an articulated bus in a dedicated lane, 2.7x passengers. If you add a boarding tube, you can achieve 3.4x passengers, and if you add double articulated buses, you can have four times as many passengers as a normal bus in a normal street.” He says that with an arrival frequency of 30 seconds, you can transport 36,000 passengers every hour — which is about the same load he would have achieved with a subway.