Photo: Julio Bittencourt

GO WITH THE FLOW: Buses form a convoy on the Francisco Matarazzo Avenue busway.

It’s a warm Tuesday night in São Paulo, and as on most nights during rush hour here, a swarm of cars clogs every centimeter of Rebouças Avenue, slowing traffic to a crawl. But inside bus 7598, Carlos Soares holds on firmly to keep his balance as the jolting vehicle whizzes past the congestion. The bus he’s on is one of thousands in this city that run in special lanes that cars are forbidden to use. Convoying one after the other, the buses form a kind of virtual train on tires.

“Look at their faces,” says Soares, a 20-year-old video producer, pointing at the drivers stuck nearby. “They’re mad because the buses took one of their lanes. But for us on the bus—we love it.”

For the past five decades, congestion has gotten steadily worse in this Brazilian megacity, South America’s largest, with 18.3 million people scattered throughout its metropolitan area. Although Brazil may be better known for the vibrant beaches of Rio de Janeiro or the lush, green Amazon forest, São Paulo is this country’s economic locomotive. So plenty of people have thought long and hard about how to keep the city moving—literally. More subway and commuter rail lines are on the way, but they are coming slowly and at great expense. Seeking alternatives, transportation experts here turned to an option that was already on the streets: the bus.

With 26 391 buses, 1908 lines, 34 transfer stations, and 146.5 kilometers of dedicated busways, São Paulo operates what is currently the world’s most complex bus system. Extending from bustling downtown avenues to narrow neighborhood streets, this sprawling network of lines is the basis of public transportation here. One in every five paulistanos—as residents of São Paulo are called—hops on a bus every day to go to work, school, or other destinations. Daily bus rider­ship in the metropolitan area is some 10.5 million passengers. With such people-moving capacity, the entire population of Belgium could ride on São Paulo’s buses over the course of a single day.

In a transportation world that has dreamed up such systems as maglev bullet trains and “smart roads” capable of guiding vehicles, bus-based mass transit may appear quite low-tech. But in São Paulo the buses themselves are only the most visible part of a vast operation that relies on a number of advanced technologies: computer simulations help plan the bus network, GPS monitoring keeps track of the fleet, and electronic payment streamlines fare collection. And in an experiment to reduce pollutant emissions, later this year São Paulo will test a small number of hydrogen-fuel-cell buses on one of the city’s busiest busways.

None of this technology would be of much use without experienced bus engineers, of whom São Paulo has plenty. Over the years this cadre of bus pros has been disseminating its expertise throughout Brazil and beyond. As Pedro Szasz, a consultant in São Paulo and one of the world’s top public transportation experts, puts it, “Brazilians are good at soccer, samba, and bus systems.”

Other cities have taken notice. Committees from all corners of the globe descend on São Paulo every year to see how folks here run their buses (ônibus, in Portuguese). São Paulo, after all, is hardly the only megacity facing megatraffic problems. Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Shanghai are but a few. The waste in time and fuel is enormous. According to the Texas Transportation Institute, in College Station, traffic congestion in 85 U.S. urban areas cost the nation more than US $63 billion in 2003. The International Association of Public Transport, in Brussels, puts such costs for 15 European countries at €120 billion per year.

How can we prevent cities from choking themselves in traffic and pollution? Experts all agree there’s no silver bullet. Cities need a mix of mass transit systems, and designing such systems needs to be part of a broader urban development plan. With its expansive bus operation, São Paulo is showing that this transportation option has a crucial role in that mix.