Local "Planning" Follies, part 5... Curitiba—The Third World Gets It

Curitiba—The Third World Gets It

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Part of a series. See Local "Planning" Follies Part 1 - The state of play in land use planning for links to all posts.

In 2006, the Sacramento’s Great Valley Conference hosted a talk by one of the world’s foremost city planners, the former mayor of Curitiba Brazil, Jaime Lerner. Lerner’s tenure is an inspiration because, even with limited, third world resources, his administration produced world-beating improvements in Curitiba’s quality of life. Lerner himself says that political will and core responsibility, not scale or finances, are what have led to Curitiba’s extraordinary accomplishments.

Lerner’s program was not, however, a dictatorship. To empower the citizens, projects were chosen by referenda in order to assure that they met real needs. Voters in a neighborhood knew the relative costs, and then chose between projects.

The crown jewel of Curitiba’s imaginative public policy is its transit system. As a city whose population now approaches 1.8 million, Curitiba became big enough for the Brazilian government to fund the beginnings of a subway. Mayor Lerner’s team discovered, however, that a subway, or heavy rail scheme would be ten times more expensive than light rail, and that light rail would be ten times more expensive than buses, even one with dedicated busways (“bus rapid transit,” or BRT).

The problem is that, even though a BRT system is much cheaper to build, its operating expenses exceed rail because a bus driver can only carry 40 – 80 passengers. So bus systems need more drivers, and the drivers’ salaries make bus more expensive to operate than single-driver, multi-car trains.

At this point, most public officials would have thrown up their hands, and settled for light rail, but Lerner’s administration got Volvo to manufacture three-section accordion buses that can carry 300 passengers. Lerner also promoted compact development along BRT corridors, so the transit stops are within a walk of enough customers to be viable.

The result is Curitiba’s “Speedybus” system. It enjoys increasing ridership even though per-capita car ownership is rising, something that not even European transit systems can boast. Speedybus BRT provides a bus every thirty seconds, and makes a profit. To give you an idea of the scale of this enterprise, Curitiba's mass transit volumes were 25,000 a day in 1974 and 2,000,000 passengers a day in 2000.

Speedybus BRT even sidesteps the usual debate about whether public services should be publicly or privately run. The city owns the routes, stops and fares, and private enterprise owns the buses. Naturally city planning supports transit.

Curitiba city planning has tall buildings flank the busways so many riders can walk to the stops.

Clean Slums and Bays

Another example of Curitiba’s innovative public policies: Curitiba is poor enough to have slums, but they are clean. This is not because Lerner magically widened slum streets so garbage trucks could visit them, but because he instituted a program to exchange a transit pass or bag of groceries for a bag of garbage. The slums are now self-cleaning.

In his Sacramento lecture, Lerner told of another cleanup in Curitiba’s nearby bays. Lerner agreed to pay the fishermen who worked these bays for the garbage they caught in their nets when fishing. Fishermen can now work year-round, even if the fish are not in season, and get paid. The result of their labor: a cleaner bay with more fish, and millions in savings for Curitiba.

Curitiba's education system promotes its sustainable legacy, civic heritage and history, politically empowering the next generation in the process. Lerner says that the kids teach the parents.
The education is fun, too, full of skits, and costumes. Lerner’s slideshow had a picture of the “leaf” family (people in tree suits) delivering an ecology lesson to young Curitibans. The city even has a free university for the environment. “Why not train everyone about the environment, even the janitors?” says Lerner.

Lerner’s final words: “It is possible. You can do it. Si, es possible”