Making Public Transport and Housing Match: Accomplishments and Failures of Curitba’s BRT

Abstract

The success of the world-renowned bus rapid transit (BRT) in Curitiba, Brazil, is based on the interdependence of public transport, road system hierarchy, and land use regulation. Notwithstanding the consolidation of this triple approach, the transport system is overcrowded, and in 2009, the city made a bid for a technical analysis of the economic feasibility and the determination of environmental effects of a subway infrastructure to be implemented along one of its mass transport corridors, the north-south one. However, a recent survey indicates that most of people using BRT do not actually live along these corridors, but primarily in the densely occupied peripheral districts of the city and the immediate neighboring areas of a much more populated metropolitan region. This paper searches to confirm a contraction between real urban performance and an ideal city proposed by its somewhat innovative and now 45-year-old plan that was elaborated according to, among other paradigms, high-density linear occupation to make public transport at the same time cheap and attractive for dwellers. This paper also intends to provoke a discussion on the paradoxical municipal managerial decision of, at the same time, enforcing a master plan establishing priorities in terms of public transport and not being able to combine the offer of its main structures for mass public transportation and the public implementation of low-income housing programs along them. Data used to explore these discussions are basically that referring to the use of this modal in the city of Curitiba and the location of municipal social housing programs between 1980 and 2010.