Walking, running, bicycling, and taking trains in central São Paulo

The São Paulo metropolitan area is by most measures the largest or second largest in the Western Hemisphere,¹ but it doesn’t have a very distinct image in North America or Europe. In so far as most foreigners think of São Paulo at all, it’s often as a congested, polluted, and crime-ridden place. This image is not completely inaccurate. São Paulo’s 21 or so million people² own more than seven million cars,³ and traffic jams are frequent. São Paulo is said, as a result, to have more helicopter commuters than any other city in the world. The urban area is surrounded by hills, and air quality can be terrible. Furthermore, the crime rate is indeed high, although it’s been dropping rapidly over the last fifteen years. In 2015 the murder rate was 8.56 per 100,000,⁴ among the lowest murder rates in Brazil, roughly a sixth that in Saint Louis—but twice New York’s.

Academic studies of São Paulo can also present a rather harrowing picture. Perhaps the best-known English-language work on São Paulo is anthropologist Teresa Caldera’s City of Walls,⁵ which depicts a city in which anyone who can has retreated to a gated community and stopped setting foot in socially mixed public places, leaving the streets to the poor. Some of the extensive Brazilian academic literature on São Paulo also documents the city’s extreme inequalities and intractable planning dilemmas.⁶

Three recent trips to São Paulo suggest that this view is somewhat out of date. Central São Paulo is certainly a gritty place—graffiti are everywhere—but it has a flourishing pedestrian life, healthy public spaces, and pretty good, and improving, public transportation. In the area between, roughly, the old Centro and Itaim Bibi, streets and parks and the rail system are filled with people, apparently of all social classes, and the new ciclovias (bicycle paths) are attracting a fair number of riders.

Particularly impressive is Avenida Paulista, perhaps São Paulo’s symbolically most important street (see photo).

Avenida Paulista on a warm Sunday afternoon in winter.

Avenida Paulista is both a business and a shopping street, and there are apartment buildings at its southeastern end. A substantial number of big companies (Citibank, for example) have their headquarters on the street, and there are several shopping malls and numerous other stores as well. It’s also where major political demonstrations take place. The sidewalks are crowded day and night and could hardly feel safer. Under the current administration of prefeito (mayor) Fernando Haddad, the street has been closed to motorized-vehicle traffic on Sundays. Closing Avenida Paulista must have felt roughly as it would feel in Chicago to close North Michigan Avenue and LaSalle Street on Sundays. The street was just jammed on the rather warm dry Sunday when I was there. There were plenty of diversions. Numerous musicians, for example, had set up shop. Hundreds of people were selling things (mostly craft products). Buskers dressed in fantastic costumes were drawing huge crowds. There were dozens of open-air restaurants, many of which were broadcasting the French/Portuguese Euro championship soccer game. There were also vendors of sorvete (ice), agua de coco (coconut water), and numerous other goodies. Children were diverting themselves using updrafts from subway grates to send light objects high in the air. But it’s possible that walking up and down and people-watching were the major activities of Avenida Paulista’s Sunday crowds—and perhaps of those on weekdays too. There may be no better place in the country to see masses of Brazilians in all their variety.

Also striking is the Minhocão [“big worm”] (see photo).

The Minhocão on a Sunday afternoon.

This road, officially the Via Elevada Presidente Costa e Silva, is ordinarily one of the world’s most appalling elevated urban freeways, running only a few meters from apartment buildings in a socially complicated but basically middle-class neighborhood—and said to be one of the factors in the neighborhood’s deterioration. It too has been closed to motorized traffic on Sundays, as well as at night and on late Saturday afternoons. The Minhocão was crowded when I was there, mostly with (often lightly dressed) people walking, running, or bicycling its 3.5 kilometer length. There were also a certain number of picnickers and agua de coco vendors. It’s an incredibly scenic place. You get a startlingly new view of the landscape when you walk along it. Since it has several turns and hills you also get constantly changing views of tall buildings in distant parts of the city as well as of the bustling streets below.

The city’s major inner-city park, Ibirapuera Park, is as crowded as Avenida Paulista (see photo).

Ibirapuera Park walking/running/bicycling path.

The park features a walking/running/bicycling loop, numerous less formal walking paths, basketball, weightlifting, and skating facilities, and several excellent museums. While I acknowledge that I have no way of identifying the social class of people using the park, it’s pretty clear that there are people there from many social groups.

There are, in fact, substantial numbers of pedestrians in most of the middle-class and wealthy residential neighborhoods in central São Paulo. These neighborhoods are densely built-up with apartment buildings, and generally they feel safe, at least by day. But one should not be naïve here. Most high-rise apartment buildings are surrounded by tall fences and have armed guards. And there are places in the Centro such as “Cracolândia” where there are concentrations of down-and-out people on a much larger scale than anything you’d see in, say, the East End of Vancouver or the homeless peoples’ district of downtown Los Angeles. Even if one avoids the favelas (as I did) and skips Cracolândia, the visitor to São Paulo cannot help but notice that there are large numbers of marginalized or just plain poor people in the city. It’s not clear to a foreigner how much of a danger these people pose, but well-off Brazilians clearly think the danger is immense. This fact colors the use of public space in São Paulo and other Brazilian cities. American cities of course have an analogous problem.

There are also some environmental barriers to pedestrian life. Sidewalks are often cracked. There are steep hills to contend with. And, on rainy days, the sewers are overwhelmed. But you encounter these problems in parts of North America and Western Europe too. Central São Paulo is generally a pedestrian-friendly place.

Other non-automotive transportation facilities have improved too.

The Haddad administration has made a major effort to build ciclovias (bicycle paths).⁷ More than 400 km of paths are planned, and most of them are in place. Here’s a map:

Ciclovias in São Paulo, shown by dark green lines. GIS data for ciclovias are from Vá de Bike. GIS data for streets, parks, and water are from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. The thin black lines show municipal boundaries. These were generated from a file available at GADM. I do not have data for ciclovias outside the municipality of São Paulo.

I can’t claim that most of the paths in the central city were extremely busy when I was there, but they were certainly attracting users. A newspaper story⁸ suggests what should have surprised no one. Well-off cyclists, mostly living in the center of the city, generally use the paths on weekends, for recreation. Relatively poor people, mostly living in the periphery, use them to get to work, and they do this every day and in substantial numbers.

A few of the paths, along water courses like the Pinheiros River, allow traffic-free movement for quite a distance, but most of the ciclovias run along urban streets. Ciclovias on major streets like Avenida Paulista and Avendida Faria Lima are designed in a way that seems a bit odd to a North American: They are built in the center of the street (see photo). This clearly solves the “dooring” problem and also assures cyclists’ visibility. It may also help at intersections, where special traffic lights for cyclists provide at least some protection from turning motor vehicles. It can be a long wait, though, for the lights to change. São Paulo’s ciclovias are not built for speedy cycling.

Avenida Paulista ciclovia on a weekday.

The ciclovia program has apparently aroused a huge amount of opposition. Its opponents’ chief argument is that a great deal of money is being spent on facilities that are used by only a tiny number of people. There is surely an element of truth here, and the expansion of the program has been halted for the moment.

Bicycle paths have recently been built in many other Latin American cities too, for example, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. In many ways ciclovias seem an odd fit for big Latin American cities, where traffic can be heavy and drivers have a reputation for being particularly aggressive. But, in fact, aggressive driving is far less of a problem for cyclists—and pedestrians—than in, say, Middle Eastern or South or Southeast Asian cities. Traffic lights in Latin America are usually obeyed, and sidewalks are normally free of motorized traffic, although you certainly do have to be careful at corners. The ciclovia program in São Paulo and its counterparts in other large Latin American cities seem like exceptionally worthy attempts to reduce the role of the automobile in big cities.

São Paulo’s improving—and still growing—rail transit system is surely of even greater importance than its ciclovia program. Here’s a map:

Urban rail lines in São Paulo. Red is used for lines considered to be part of the Metro. Brown is used for lines that were historically suburban rail routes. Interchange among all the lines is free. Most data were edited from files available through the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. The thin black lines represent municipal boundaries and were generated from a file available at GADM.

All the trains I rode were in good shape. São Paulo’s newest subway line, Linha 4 (the Yellow Line), with its platform doors, its open gangways between cars, its free wifi, and its ubiquitous television monitors, is particularly impressive. In appearance it’s much more like the well-funded, recently built subway lines in Asia and Europe than any other subway line in the Western Hemisphere (see photo).

Inside a Yellow Line car.

São Paulo is also (I believe) the only large city in the Western Hemisphere that has fully integrated its old suburban lines and its subway system. Although the rail lines and the two different subway companies have retained their separate corporate identities, elaborate passageways have been built to connect the systems (see photo), and one ticket gets you just about anywhere you want to go.

The complicated interchange between Metrô line 4 and CPTM (rail) line 9.

It’s true that the old rail lines, like rail lines in most places that were built originally for long-distance transport, sometimes pass rather uselessly through declining industrial areas in the inner city, but they also serve many busy commercial areas (like Avenida Faria Lima and Avenida Luís Carlos Berrini) and of course numerous suburbs that the subway lines don’t reach. The fares—the subject of recent protests—are not strikingly low given the modest salaries for unskilled work. A subway ticket costs $R3.80 (around $US1.20), less if you pay by smart card, but it’s $R5.92 if you need to transfer to a bus. The counterargument is that the one city/one fare policy ends up being a subsidy for the mostly poor people who live in the periphery.

São Paulo’s subway system proper, with 74 route-kilometers, is still rather small given the size of the city, but it attracts more riders per kilometer of track than any other Western Hemisphere metro system, perhaps in part because of its tie-in with the suburban rail lines.⁹

São Paulo has, in other words, been an enthusiastic participant in the nearly worldwide movement to reduce the role of the automobile in urban life. It’s also clear that some of the negative stereotypes of life in São Paulo are at the very least exaggerated. I can’t claim to be an expert on the city, and I’m perfectly willing to admit that I don’t have much experience at all in the newer suburbs or in the periphery in general, which may well be as pedestrian-unfriendly as in most places. But the central city broadly defined—which covers quite a substantial area—seems to be quite a vibrant, reasonably walkable, and reasonably safe place that, despite the current recession, has been reducing its level of automobile dependence at least modestly in recent years.