BRT Workshop and Technical Assistance in Sao Paulo, 18 and 19 March 2008

Posted: 02 Apr 2008

Related to: São Paulo City Center Revitalization, Developing High-Quality, Low-Cost Mass Transit, Brazil
Contributed by: Jonas Hagen, ITDP

Transport is near the collapsing point in Sao Paulo, with new records for traffic jams set every week. Despite having the longest network of exclusive bus lanes in the world (146 km) that serve 10 million daily riders in the metropolitan region, public transport is insufficient in South America’s largest city, as evidenced by an automobile fleet that grows at 10 percent a year.

Although São Paulo’s busways were some of the first to be implemented in the world, bus service in the city is not up to the level of Curitiba, Brazil or Bogotá, Colombia’s systems. Ironically, it was engineers from São Paulo that helped make the Transmilenio and other BRT systems around the world the successes they are today.

One of these engineers is Pedro Szasz, who has worked extensively in Brazil, China, Colombia, Mexico, Indonesia, to name a few places. On the 18th and 19th of March 2008, Pedro gave a workshop on BRT infrastructure in his hometown, in a joint response by ITDP and the Clinton Climate Initiative to a request from local transport authorities for technical assistance.



Workshop participants conduct a site visit to the site of future BRT station, March 19 2008.

The request originally came from the Sao Paulo Metropolitan Area Transport Company (EMTU) for aid in designing BRT stations with pre-paid boarding along a planned 12 kilometer corridor called Diadema-Brooklin. Pedro Szasz and others gave presentations on BRT station design on the 18th of March at São Paulo’s prestigious Institute of Engineering. On the 19th, participants conducted a site visit of the entire corridor. The visit was followed by group design exercises, where participants designed stations for two specific points. 


Pedro Szasz speaks to participants on March 18, 2008.

This project represents an excellent opportunity to improve transport in Sao Paulo and reduce CO₂ emissions, as well as local pollutants, as electric-powered trolleybuses are planned for use in the corridor. Because most of the electricity in São Paulo comes from clean hydroelectric power, trolleybuses represent a nearly ‘zero-emissions’ mode of transport for the city.

The event, which had a total of 45 participants, brought together technicians from the EMTU and SPTrans, Sao Paulo’s municipal transport authority. The integration of technicians from SPTrans and EMTU was an important result of the workshop, because bus lines from both authorities converge on the Diadema-Brooklin BRT. 95 percent of the participants evaluated the course as “good” or “very good.”


After the site visit to the future BRT corridor, the participants came back to participate in a group design exercise.

The technical assistance will continue over the next few months with the help of Pedro Szasz, specifically for the Diadema-Brooklin BRT.

ITDP and CCI would like to thank EMTU, SPTrans, the Institute of Engineering, as well as other partners and speakers, and hopes to continue providing meaningful technical assistance to the authorities responsible for public transport in Sao Paulo and the metropolitan region.