By Bruno Bocchini
The public transportation system of the city of São Paulo has lost 30% or almost a third of its passengers in the lastten0 years.
In 2013, the system transported 2.9 billion passengers, a number that fell to 2.04 billion in 2022.
The city’s population increased by 3.2% in the same period, from 11.8 billion people to 12.2 billion.
The drop in passenger numbers was sharp during the Covid-19 pandemic, starting in 2020.
However the reduction was already visible in the previous period, from 2013 (2.9 billion passengers carried) to 2019 (2.6 billion), a period when it fell by 9.8% and the city’s population increased by 3.6%.
The data are from researcher Daniel Santini, based on information from São Paulo City Hall.
“They were 3 billion trips a year in 2013; in 2022, they were 2 billion. Our system has shrunk by a third.”
“If we spend another 20 years like this, it will disappear,” says Santini, who conducts research at the University of São Paulo (USP) on zero fare public policies.
“It’s not only Covid-19 [that caused the drop in the number of trips]; we have an ongoing crisis, there is a trend line, even before Covid.”
“From 2013 to 2019, São Paulo had already lost about 10% of the number of passengers, which is a lot; and from 2013 to 2023, it lost 30%,” points out the researcher.
He is also the author of the book “Passe Livre: as Possibilidades da Tarifa Zero contra a Distopia da Uberização” and co-organizer of “Mobilidade Antirracista”.
According to Santini, the shrinking of trips in public transportation in the city of São Paulo is representative of what is happening in other cities in the country.
He says that the system’s way of financing, based on charging fares at turnstiles, which are increasingly expensive, is running out, and needs to be rethought.
“With this shrinking, it becomes more difficult to balance the financing based on the revenue from the turnstiles.”
“To balance it, you have to increase the fare; the increase in the fare makes the system more exclusive, and the imbalance increases because you have a reduction in the number of passengers.”
According to the researcher, another way that has been adopted to face the problem of the decrease in the number of passengers is to reduce the amount of buses on the streets.
“If you don’t want to increase the fare, what do you do? You reduce the circulating fleet; but by reducing the circulating fleet, less people will use the bus and, again, you have the same problem.”
Engineer Lúcio Gregori, transportation secretary in Luiza Erundina’s administration (1989-1993) and developer of the Zero Fare Project in São Paulo says that, with the successive increases in transportation fares, part of the population is no longer able to afford public transportation.
“The reduction of trips results from increasingly higher fare adjustments, for example, due to increased fuel prices.”
“But in general, the issue is about fares.”
“I mean, fares have been increasing to the extent that users have been unable to pay them and have stopped using public transportation. That’s it.”
The reduction of trips in urban public transportation can also be seen at a national level, from the figures of the National Association of Urban Transportation Companies (NTU).
The data consider the monthly trips in the capitals Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Fortaleza, Goiânia, Porto Alegre, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and São Paulo.
Taking April as a reference, 381.1 million trips were made in 2013, compared to 282.7 million in April 2019 (before the Covid-19 pandemic) and 202.9 million in 2021.
In 2020, at the height of the health isolation, there were only 92.4 million trips, creating a severe crisis in the transportation system dependent on the fare paid at the turnstiles.
“The pandemic brought to light what the specialists, the operators, the technicians who are most involved with this issue have been saying for a long time: this service has been falling in production, the quality has been decreasing, and the costs have been increasing significantly.”
“There is no way to pass on the production cost of the service entirely to the passenger. The passenger can’t afford it anymore”, says NTU’s executive president, Francisco Christovam.
ZERO FARES AS A SOLUTION
According to the survey by researcher Daniel Santini, 72 municipalities in the country have already adopted full zero fare in public transportation, i.e., the free pass that covers the entire system every day of the week.
According to the data, in 2013, there were 17 municipalities in the country with zero fares; in 2019 (before the Covid-19 pandemic), 31; and in 2023, there are 72 cities, showing that the post-pandemic evolution accelerated.
“Companies have started advocating for zero fare because the model based on turnstile revenue no longer holds up.”
“And it’s not only this factor to be considered, there’s also the electoral one, zero fare gets votes,” Santini points out.
“Does this mean that the pressure from the streets did not influence the process?”
“Quite the contrary. Street pressure and June 2013 were very important to consolidate the idea of mobility as a right”, he adds.
The researcher recalls that the street pressure was crucial for the approval of the Proposal for Constitutional Amendment (PEC) 74, 2013, enacted as Constitutional Amendment 90, 2015.
The amendment, suggested by federal congresswoman Luiza Erundina, then in the PSB and currently in the PSOL, elevated transportation to a social right that the State must guarantee.
“This is the main legal basis for us to have the perspective that, just like education and health, we can fight for transportation with universal free access”, says the researcher.
Last May, the same congresswoman presented, along with other members of Congress, specialists, and organized civil society, the PEC of Zero Fare, which regulates the right to transportation and has the objective of guaranteeing a free public transportation system, made possible through the Contribution to the Use of the Road System (ConUSV).
The approval of the PEC is necessary for the municipalities to implement the contribution, since any new municipal tax needs to be authorized by the National Congress.
Gregori, who prepared the ConUSV for Erundina, explains that the contribution is a possibility of a new source of resources to turn the zero fare into reality.
“It is a contribution calculated from the size of the vehicle, front versus depth of the vehicle, multiplied by the power of the engine because the more powerful, in theory, the more polluting the car is.”
According to the engineer, once this calculation is done, the cars would be classified into three levels: large, medium, and small, and a different contribution would be charged for each of these sizes.
“I made a hypothesis of charging R$3.50 per day for the big car, R$2.50 per day for the medium car, and R$1 per day for the small car. I applied these values to the 2019 vehicle fleet of the city of São Paulo.”
“The revenue obtained was US$6.5 billion, which creates plenty of conditions to implement the zero fare.
Another funding proposal raised by Gregori is the use of Transport Vouchers, already paid by employers, to fund the system.
“The Transport Voucher, as it is today, is dumb, because after a certain amount of salary you don’t want to have the discount, because the discount that is given on the salary is greater than the cost of the public transport fare. ”
“So, we propose to make a single value”.
Edited by Graça Adjuto
With information from Gazeta Brasil
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