Why a Ten Cent Bus Fare Hike Was Too Much for São Paulo

São Paulo’s sprawl, by Roger4336/Flickr

It was a rainy day somewhere north of 80 degrees, and a woman was standing on my feet. It wasn’t her fault, really; in a triple-length bus crammed with a few hundred people as it rumbled slowly down São Paulo’s jammed streets, there was nowhere else she could go. I’d decided 20 minutes earlier that I was already sweaty enough to just give up, jump off the bus, and walk through the rain. But considering that people were packed into a tight, communal hug, and that the bus had moved less than two kilometers in the last hour, getting to the door was as yet impossible. Oh, and the guy behind me had nowhere else to breathe but on my neck.

I spent 2010 living in São Paulo, and while the particular moment above still sticks out to me as notably terrible, the claustrophobic congestion on São Paulo’s streets and within its public transportation is far from atypical. As Brazil’s countrywide protests continue, I’ve seen a fair number of Americans online wonder how it could all be sparked by what’s seemingly a relatively innocuous public transit fare hike.

The outrage has worked: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have both agreed to roll back the ten-cent fare increase, although protesters are reportedly quieting down until they get more. But, honestly, New York just saw a 25-cent fare increase on its subway, and no one took to the streets. How can a bump of a few centavos spark such a larger response? The answer lies in the sharp contrast between São Paulo’s highs and lows, which is exemplified best by the city’s transit system.

During my time down there, I spent stints living in a run-down house in a far-flung, tough neighborhood, rarely falling asleep to the sound of not-distant-enough sound of gunshots—turns out it’s really difficult to lease an apartment when your visa’s expired—and living in an upscale apartment with a gym, rooftop pool, the works. The only constant between the two spots was just how much of a pain in the ass it was to get anywhere else.

São Paulo is old city, and its 450 years of growth into the largest city in the Americas has left it a sprawling, convoluted mess. Its subway system has grown since 2010, but still only services a small portion of the city. Add to that former President Dilma Rousseff’s astounding 55 percent tax on imported cars, and most people are left riding São Paulo’s massive network of city buses, on which they still spend up to 26 percent of their income.

The high price of cars certainly hasn’t deterred every Paulista from owning one, and the city’s general lack of freeways means that, unless you’re one of the omnipresent motoboys, you’ll spend a large portion of your day sitting in traffic, regardless of whether you’re a well-off person in a European econobox or anyone else packed ass-to-gut in one of the city’s double- and triple-length buses.

There’s no better way to highlight just how chaotic the confluence of a populace heavily reliant on ground transportation and massive city made up largely of small streets and avenues actually is than to compare it to the other automotive clusterfuck I’ve dealt with in my life: good old Los Angeles.

We deal with the same problems in the US, but in Brazil they’re at times deeper and often more apparent.

In LA, as terrible as traffic can be, the super rich still drive around (or are still driven around in) their Benzos and Rollers. In São Paulo, the super rich have given up on roads altogether. The city now has more registered helicopters than anywhere else in the world, a point driven every time an oligarch landed on the helipad directly across a street from my old bathroom window.

São Paulo is a wonderful city, and it’s great for a foreigner, far removed from the tourist hellscape that Rio can be. It’s also filled with some of the kindest people I’ve ever been fortunate to meet. It’s also fun as hell. There are so many holidays you sometimes don’t even know what it is you’re celebrating. Every weekend is a barbecue at the beach, staying at a club until the club itself serves breakfast, or cramming into a tiny bar for cachaça served from a cask while a nine piece samba band plays. But get past the usual arguing over the city’s four pro soccer teams and into people’s concerns, and they’ll drill down the list of crime, corruption, and poverty every time.

We deal with the same problems in the US, but in Brazil they’re at times deeper and often more apparent. In the US, political corruption is carefully hidden and orchestrated; the same goes in Brazil, but you also hear about people getting busted with bribes stuffed in their underpants. It comes at you in snippets: you meet a cop driving around with a car stereo he lifted from impound, hear a joke about entering a public hospital with the flu and leaving missing an arm, listen to a story shared over Black Label about police asking for bribes to arrest the robber caught in the security cam footage.

The view from Parque Ibirapuera, by the author

Then there’s the broader ills that lie around you all the time. The city’s pollution. The incredible cost of living. The way extremely poor neighborhoods butt up against luxury high-rises replete with patrolling security. (In Rio, which is struggling to get ready for the Olympics as well as its part of the World Cup, the transition between the city and its patchwork of favelas can be striking.) The fact that one of the city’s coolest pair of museums is a stone’s throw from a neighborhood literally called Crackland. Wealth and poverty are intrinsic sources of tension in any metropolitan city, and São Paulo certainly doesn’t break the mold. But when it’s all there on display at all times, it’s no surprise that people get fed up.

And god damn, the traffic. It rules your life. Imagine standing pressed up against the weight of a bunch of other schmucks as your bus lurches at two miles an hour. You look outside and watch as an elderly person with a walker flies past. It turns your life into a sick comedy ruled by the revving and lurching of an overloaded tube of people.

Combine that with a government that’s lagging in public services but which can suddenly find $14 billion to build new World Cup stadia—and, in the case of Rio, splash a fresh coat of paint over the city’s same structural problems to prep it for the Olympics—and the third fare transit fare hike in three years is enough to get the blood boiling. That goes doubly so when the government—which, despite raking in insane import tariffs to match high general taxes, blamed inflation for the hike.

So, yeah, a ten-cent hike in transit fares may seem trivial here in the States, even if prices rising from R$2.00 a ride in 2005 to R$3.20 (now back to R$3.00 with the reversal) in 2013 is far from a pittance, especially for the city’s many poor. And yes, the protestors plan to continue protesting because the underlying sources of their frustration are numerous. But in a city ruled by highly-visible contrasts of its success and failings, making the endless slog through traffic even ten cents worse is just too much.