Brazil and their chaotic transportation system

Brazil is consider today to be one of the countries with the highest number of airports and roads in the world. However, what is good for some people is bad for others. The public transportation system in Brazil represents a big issue for the people that make short trips in the main cities, especially for the fans. Sometimes short rides that seem efficient and faster than other modes of transportation, are not always the best choice. Taking the bus to go cheer for your country or just grabbing a train to go back to your hotel, is a tedious and slow way of traveling.

For the rest of the world, relying on public transportation to move around the city is an efficient and easy way to travel, but for the 4 million people that visit Brazil for the 2014 World Cup is a nightmare. Also, visitors who want to see most of the matches have to travel between the 12 hosting cities of the World Cup, which can become another issue since Brazil holds one of the heaviest traffic in the world. So, how did Brazil commit this mistake?

For the past four years, the south american country has received money from state entities ($13.750 millions to be exact), to renovate the public infrastructure, build more hotels, and rearrange the satellite system so that half of the world (3.500 million people) could watch the World Cup on their TV's. How ridiculous is that?

The moment has come for Brazil to ask themselves a critical question: have all this investments and planning for the past 4 years been worth it? Are Brazil's public transportation systems ready to move massive amounts of tourists? I think not.

The biggest issues happen in the cities where the matches are taking place. Even know the government tries to reduce the agglomeration of traffic with labor breaks and the reduction of working hours, the respond isn't enough. During the first days of the competition, the cities of Brasilia, El Salvador, Fortaleza and Belo Horizonte registered the first sings of heavy traffic that made the government realize that the public transportation was not good enough to hold that many people.

In Rio the Janeiro, the city officials have calculated that approximately 320.000 people take the buses that connect the airports in Brazil with the host cities of the World Cup.

At the same time this is happening, the country believes that the remodeling and expansion done to the airports in the cities will allow the capacity these places can hold to grow up to 81% during the tournament.

 
The most important thing, experts say, is to improve the quality of its infrastructure so it can become an efficient, clean, and cheap mode of transportation. Whether this will happen or not, time will say. Clearly, Brazil needs to solve this problem since it represents a threat to both the quality of the service provided in the 2014 Fifa World Cup and the upcoming 2016 Summer Olympics that are going to take place in the city of Rio de Janeiro two years from now.