Brazil's transport nightmare at heart of protests

Demonstrators confront the riot police after clashes erupted during a protest against corruption and price hikes, on June 20, 2013, in Rio de Janeiro as the FIFA Confederations Cup Brazil 2013 is being held in the country. Brazilians took to the streets again Thursday in several cities on a new day of mass nationwide protests, demanding better public services and bemoaning massive spending to stage the World Cup. (AFP/Getty Images)

Football fans flocking to Brazil for the World Cup will find dilapidated trains, packed buses and snarled traffic — but Brazilians face these struggles every day, and they’ve had enough.

Preparations for next year’s sporting jamboree have been overshadowed by mass protests that began as anger against rising public transport costs and grew into a movement against corruption and government waste.

Brazil’s trains, buses and metros are notoriously inefficient but fares are as high as in many developed countries, and when sprawling cities like Sao Paulo and Rio tried to hike prices further the frustration spilled over.

The ticket price rises have since been canceled by spooked authorities, but the protests have picked up a momentum of their own, with the mainly young marchers denouncing spending on the upcoming World Cup.

“Overall, Brazilian public transport is deficient, especially in the big cities, because it can’t respond to demand,” said planning expert Marcos Cintra, vice president of the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo.

“The original sin is insufficient rail transport, especially for the metro, and without that, we cannot improve.”

For many of Brazil’s 194 million people, especially the poorest, who lack cars and live far from work with limited transport options, the daily commute is a nightmare.

Ricardo Jefferson, a 29-year-old samba musician from Baixada Fluminense north of Rio, spends two to three hours each morning on trains and buses to go to work downtown. He then has to repeat the trip to return home.

“The trains are a mess and on the bus, it can take me up to four hours,” he told AFP as he waited for his train amid clashes between police and protesters in front of the Maracana football stadium last weekend.

“I work like a dog, I’m tired, and when I go catch the train or the bus, they are jam-packed and you feel mistreated.”

Tickets — which Sao Paulo has said will revert to $1.35 from $1.44, while they will return to $1.24 for buses in Rio — rarely allow passengers to make transfers between different modes of transportation.

The huge wave of public anger stems from a lack of public investment over the past five decades, and has now spiraled into resentment over the $15 billion cost of staging the Confederations Cup and the World Cup.

“If we saw a film on public transport in Brazil in the 1950s and compared it to the situation today, we would see that nothing has changed,” said Marcio d’Agosto, who coordinates a transport engineering program at the Federal University of Rio.

Even Rio’s Mayor Eduardo Paes admitted this week that the city’s transportation system is “really bad quality.”

“There were many years without investment,” he said.

Joana Maria dos Santos, a 45-year-old hair dresser, lives in Queimados, in Rio’s northern suburbs.

To get to her salon in Rio’s southern Ipanema neighborhood she spends three hours by train and bus. “And it’s twice longer if even a single drop of rain falls,” she explained.

Chris Gaffney, a US expert on city planning who lives in Rio and is studying changes in Brazil ahead of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, said the focus was on buses to bring people from the periphery into the city.

“But the poor quality of the service, the high fees and competition with cars in a small space — all that in deteriorating road conditions — has left urban infrastructure on the brink of paralysis,” he said.

Traffic conditions worsened drastically over the past decade with an explosion in the number of cars on the roads as Brazil posted sustained economic growth. Each day, 10,000 new cars hit the road.

In Sao Paulo alone, a megalopolis of 20 million, there are up to 250 kilometers (155 miles) of traffic jams every single day.