Bus Riders Union of Austin, Texas | El Sindicato de Pasajeros

By Curtis Moore
International Wildlife
January-February 1994

Jaime Lerner's face beads with sweat as he battles a fever that has gripped him for five days. The strain of talking in English to a journalist who can't speak Lerner's native Portuguese probably doesn't help. He is the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, a figure of international interest among green thinkers. He pauses often, reaching for the right words to explain how his little-known Third World city has become what some planners call the most environmentally advanced urban area on Earth.

I have come here on assignment for International Wildlife to see firsthand whether this city of 1.6 million people, where the average family earns roughly $100 per week, really deserves its green reputation. On a plateau 417 kilometers (260 miles) south of São Paulo, Curitiba was founded about three centuries ago. In the last 20 years, its population has increased 250 percent as rural people displaced from their farms flocked to the city's favelas, or shantytowns.

Elsewhere, in more than two decades of international travel exploring environmental issues, I have seen this kind of explosive growth choke cities with smog and foul their rivers with unregulated sewage and industrial waste. Yet, somehow, Curitiba has taken another path.

Lerner's vision is simple, he tells me. "If you want to help, try to do just two things: Use your car less, and separate your garbage." His plan, however, is more ambitious than he makes it sound. Curitiba's air is clean because of a bus system that's probably the world's best. Recycling rates beat those in Japan, considered a world leader. Green zoning safeguards open spaces. Stiff regulations protect every tree in the city. Green space per person has risen a hundredfold in 30 years. And the poor not only receive free medical, dental and child care but swap trash for food.

Lerner, a native of Curitiba, trained in France as an architect and urban planner and has been a dominant political force in his hometown for about two decades. He's specialized in finding solutions that solve more than one problem. And in a slow and difficult process, he has reshaped the city, building his political influence in little steps.

One example occurred on a chill winter weekend in 1972 when Lerner sent city workers to convert the busiest of the downtown avenues, XV of November Street, into a pedestrian mall. Merchants had protested the idea, but they opened their shops on Monday to a largely finished job. As business flourished, protests faded. Within weeks, nearby stores were begging for their streets to be converted into pedestrian zones too. Each triumph like the mall earned Lerner more credibility with voters, allowing him to try yet another innovation.

His vision, which he marries with a pragmatic can-do execution, has both transformed Curitiba and demonstrated what is possible to make cities livable. As I quickly find out, the streets here are cleaner than Tokyo's, quieter than Vienna's and greener than Washington's. I am becoming a believer:

The buses move people with the same efficiency as a modern subway, but at only 1 to 3 percent of the cost. In all. buses carry more than 900,000 riders a day, equivalent to two-thirds of the city's residents. Because so many people use the system, it is one of the few public transit systems in the world that pays for itself.

Lerner started building the system in the 1970s, creating a winning mix of fast express arteries, local feeder buses and special routes for circulating in the downtown. The city allows only high-rise apartment buildings near major arteries and each building must devote the bottom two floors to stores. The nearby stores minimize the need for residents to travel, and the high-rises give large numbers of commuters quick access to buses. Within the last three years, Curitiba has added an ingenious idea that makes its buses even faster: boarding tubes. Resting beside the road, these steel-and-glass cylinders are about 3 meters (9 ft.) in diameter and 11 meters (35 ft.) long. Instead of climbing steps onto the bus and then paying the fare, passengers insert tokens to board, then simply wait in the tube for one of the specially designed buses to dock.

I've been standing only about four minutes in a tube when a chime sounds - remarkably like those I've heard in subways throughout the world. Wide entrance doors slide open, a stainless steel ramp lowers, and, within seconds, I've stepped into a triple-length bus able to carry 270 passengers. Its sculpted seats, wide glass windows and liberal amounts of stainless steel mimic the world's newest subway systems.

Special tax breaks and Curitiba's pivotal location - on a railroad and highway hub and just 100 kilometers (62 mi.) from one of Brazil's largest seaports - attracted a variety of companies. New Holland-Ford Corporation arrived first, starting to manufacture tractors in 1972, followed in 1979 by a Philip Morris plant for tobacco products and a Siemens manufacturing plant for motors and other equipment in 1983. Today, with 213 industrial plants and another 179 related facilities in operation as well as 136 planned or under construction, the Industrial City generates about 33,000 jobs directly and another 150,000 indirectly.

Once planted. a tree can't be cut - or even trimmed substantially - without a permit. For every tree that's felled, two must be planted. Violations draw escalating, automatic fines beginning at $10 - the equivalent of about half a day's pay. Some fines for cutting stands of trees have amounted to tens of thousands of dollars. Cutting four species of tree, including the parana pine, the city's symbol, triggers double fines.

Public parks and other green areas have grown apace. In 1965, Curitiba offered roughly half a square meter (5 sq. ft.) of green space a person. Today, even after fast population growth, the city boasts about 50 square meters (540 sq. ft.) a person, for a total of 8,712 hectares (21,527 acres) .

Run by neighborhood associations whose officers are elected by residents, the program distributes rice, beans, eggs, bananas, onions and other staples weekly in each of 54 neighborhoods. It feeds 102,000 people and collects 400 tons of garbage per month.

As I watch, a worker grunts as he heaves bunches of bananas and bags of potatoes into the arms of others who carry the food into a storage shed. Men and women quietly crowd the cooperative's entrance, their faces lined by the tropical sun. There's neither pushing nor shouting, just patient waiting with an occasional curious glance at the foreigner with a tape recorder.

Lacking money for massive public relations campaigns, Lerner costumed people as leaves - the Leaf Family as they are called - to visit schools. There, the "leaves" explained to children not only how to sort and recycle, but why it is important. Quickly, kids became the city's best allies, teaching parents to sort trash for specially designed and equipped collection trucks - painted green, of course.

In addition, the city relies on two other cadres of allies: red-garbed street sweepers and other private employees who collect garbage and groom the streets; and, the roughly 1,000 carrinheiros, or cart people, who push two-wheeled carts door-to-door. picking up trash, which they then sell at recycling centers. With the advent of sorting, the carrinheiros were able to increase sharply the volume and value of their pickings. tripling their income and thus bringing badly needed money into the favelas where most of them live.

These three armies - children, cart people and street sweepers - quickly raised recycling in Curitiba to levels among the world's highest. Roughly 70 percent of the paper and 60 percent of the plastic, metal and glass in Curitiba are recycled, eclipsing the 50 percent achieved by Japan, widely considered the world's leader. Within three years, the amount of waste going to Curitiba's landfills decreased 30 percent by weight and 50 percent by volume.

I visit a favela clinic that provides medical care free. Next door is a childcare center, also free. I peer through the clinic door, uncomfortable at invading the privacy of patients. Sick children listlessly await the doctor's attention. In the next room, dentists and technicians work at four chairs, filling cavities. Across the hall, the staff administers vaccinations.

Once the health programs started, the infant mortality rate - important in itself - but also as a measure of a population's general level of health and nutrition plummeted 60 percent between 1977 and 1988.

What impresses me most about Curitiba, however, cannot be reduced to cold statistics. Among the people here. there is a palpable enthusiasm, a brightness and zest. I see it in teenagers bunched over a table at a city-sponsored class, their hands dipping into rich black earth as they pot seedlings. The students notice me and suddenly turn in my direction, flashing smiles. their faces open and innocent. I think of scenes from Mexico, Ecuador, Vietnam and other Third World nations I've visited - the grinding poverty and sullen. resentful glances - and ask myself again what has set Curitiba apart?

Jaime Lerner's words echo in my mind: "Government should respect the people."

Curtis Moore, former counsel to the US. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, writes extensively on environmental issues.