Public Transportation – Curitiba vs. the World – Topic for TUE 17th 2009

ESC has made a selection of cool articles and papers available over the Internet. We attempted to find out information that might be useful and meaningful to our debate. How many english words related to transportation (means of tranportation, geography, economy, politics etc) do you think you know?

Come and enjoy an interesting talk! You’ll surely learn something out of it!

Interesting articles:

• http://thetransitpass.wordpress.com/2009/10/21/curitibas-bus-rapid-transit/
• http://www.solutions-site.org/artman/publish/article_62.shtml
• http://www.dismantle.org/curitiba.htm

Curitiba is a clean, attractive city that enjoys significantly higher per-capita income than the national average. However, important national indicators contrast sharply with those associated with the U.S. and Canada.

According to the official website of the city government, Curitiba’s annual “Gross Internal Product” is US $12.1 billion a year , and the annual income per capita is U.S.$8,000, significantly higher than the $5,000 national average for Brazil (http://w ww.curitiba.pr .gov.br/pmc/ingles/Cidade/Perfil/index.html; broken link at 2007.1.13).

Brazil, a very large country with a low population density, is almost tailor-made for road transport. More buses are built in Brazil than in any other country. Wages are low and the country produces much of the petroleum it consumes. Although it strives for self-sufficiency in petroleum, Brazil must import more than 40 percent of its oil, mostly from Argentina and Venezuela. This is down from 75 percent during the early 1970s.

Brazil had just 14 million passenger cars in 1999, compared to 130 million in the U.S. The number of passenger cars in Brazil was just a bit more than in Canada — which had less than 20 percent of Brazil’s population. About four million cars,  slightly less than 30 percent of the total fleet, burned pure ethanol (http://www.consumerenergycenter .org/transportation/afv/ethanol.html;  broken link at 2007.1.13;  California Energy Commission, Consumer Energy Center home page:
http://www.consumerenergycenter .org/ ).
Curitiba’s city government has a well-deserved attention for managing urban problems with creative strategies making the best use of limited resources. Among the city’s most striking successes are those related to coordination of public transportation and land use. Curitiba has accomplished this to a degree to which most U.S. and Canadian cities can only dream. To some extent, then, the commentary below is unduly dismal:
“Curitiba is a system which provides a third-world solution to a third world problem . . . not to entice passengers out of their cars but rather to provide basic public transport for an impoverished population” (unsigned editorial, Transit Australia, February 1999).

However , the fact remains that Curitiba’s public transport services are relatively labor-intensive, fuel-intensive and slow. Such a system would not fare well if it had to compete against the transport choices available to consumers in high-wage countries.

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