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A year or so ago, Monocle asked me for a brief piece on the proposed bullet train between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
I sent them a short article that clearly showed my scepticism over not just the timing of the link – it was originally supposed to be ready in time for the 2014 World Cup – but also its entire premise.
(The piece was sufficiently sceptical that Monocle sent it back and asked me if there was nothing positive to say about the project. They eventually printed a straight up story of what the project entailed. Unfortunately, Monocle does not make its magazine articles available online. )
Hindsight is a marvellous thing but so far I’ve been proven right, especially about the timing. More than two years after it was announced, work has still to start on what Brazil calls the TAV, or Trem de Alta Velocidade.
The tender has been postponed twice and the country’s own courts have questioned how feasible the project is and whether it is environmentally sound.
All this came back to me this morning when I read that China was about to open a high speed rail service between Shanghai and Beijing. The 1,318-km link cost $33.9 billion and took three years to build.
That is almost three times the distance of the Rio and SP line at a cost of around 1.5 times what Brazil proposes to pay for its shorter version.
Now, comparisons between Brazil and China are always unfair for obvious reasons.
But this example nevertheless serves to illustrate why the gap between the two nations will continue to grow, as well as highlight why Brazil faces a credibility deficit.
It’s not just that China says it will do things and then does them, in the stipulated time and at something resembling the proposed budget.
More pertinent is Brazil’s own promises and expectations.
It promises the earth and then falls short. Or it ends up paying well over the odds when it realises it has overstretched itself.
It happened with the Pan American Games in 2007, when it promised to construct 54 km of metro and built precisely nothing. It is happening with the World Cup, where it took two years to decide on the venues and then another year to start building. I’d also bet it will happen with the 2016 Olympics.
Brazil’s bullet train might still come to fruition. But in a country with almost no passenger railways wouldn’t it be easier to build an ordinary, and much cheaper, rail system between the major cities?
It’s never smart to try and run before you can walk.
Sometimes it is hard to believe that Brazil really wants to advance.
I’ve written a lot, and repeatedly lauded, the economic progress and the reduction of inequality that marked the Lula years, such as in this Time piece and in this feature for the KPMG magazine.
But then I see reports like this one in today’s Folha and wonder whether Brazil’s development will remain purely financial.
The report is about how drink driving is still an serious issue on federal motorways because loopholes allow establishments, including service stations, to sell alcohol at the side of the road.
The story says that 93 percent of the shops alongside federal highways are in urban (or municipal) areas and so exempt from the federal legislation.
The idea that you can seriously hope to reduce road accidents while allowing establishments to sell alcohol at petrol stations beggars belief.
I wrote about the government’s well-intentioned but somewhat half-hearted attempt to tighten laws on alcohol sales in this Christian Science Monitor piece in 2008.
The Health Minister at the time said that alcohol is a factor in more than half of all accidents on federal highways. Alcohol-related accidents cost the country more than $6 billion dollars a year in lost production, car damage, and health costs, the ministry said.
In my story, I noted:
“Supporters of the ban note that 62 lawmakers, or 1 in 10, had their election campaigns financed by makers of beer, wine, or cachaça (a distilled alcoholic beverage made from sugar cane), according to the Congresso em Foco website.”
The sad and outrageous fact here is when the law was proposed several associations, such as the Brazilian Association of Bars and Restaurants, went to court in order to maintain the right sell alcohol to drivers.
Two big retail store chains, Walmart and Carrefour, won injunctions against the ban. The ban passed but in this watered-down state.
The idea of putting a common good before profit is still rare in Brazil and as companies exercise more and more power and the government fails to support regulatory agencies that shows no signs of changing.
The actions of those two multi-billion dollar firms, as well as of the local associations, would be scandalous if it weren’t so tragic.
They put making money ahead of saving lives.
I wrote a travel piece recently about São Paulo that started something like this:
“The first thing to do before touching down in São Paulo is forget all those glamorous images you have of Brazil. Forget about long sandy beaches packed with beautiful people in skimpy bikinis, the glorious postcards of Christ the Redeemer and Sugarloaf mountain, or the sensuous beat of samba and carnival.
That’s Rio de Janeiro. São Paulo is its ugly sister.
But like many an ugly sister forced to take a back seat to the sibling who had it all, São Paulo has carved out a niche for itself through hard work and dedication. This once small coffee town has grown in size and stature to become one of the most interesting, cosmopolitan and dynamic cities in the world.
São Paulo and the surrounding metropolis of 20 million people is Brazil’s industrial and financial capital, with some of the best culture, gastronomy, fashion and nightlife not just in Brazil but in the whole southern hemisphere.”
Unfortunately, the editor thought it was too negative and I had to rewrite it.
I thought about that story this morning when I saw in the papers that São Paulo is to get an official city tour bus, one of those red double decker things that pick people up and drop them off at sites around the city.
The SP tour, according to the Folha de S. Paulo
My first thought was, “Where are they going to take them?”
And my second was, “They’ll spend half their time in traffic.”
Most of the world’s big cities have these tours and I think this is São Paulo wanting to be like the big boys in London, Paris and New York.
But I can’t for the life of me work out the point of it all. There simply isn’t very much to see in São Paulo. Reports say – typically there is nothing on the official SPTuris site - that the bus will visit the municipal market, Pacaembu football stadium, Avenida Paulista, Ibirapuera park, the Japanese neighborhood of Liberdade, and the city’s opera house, amongst other places (see diagram right). These are not sites to excite a foreign visitor.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Sampa is a fascinating city. But when I wrote that travel piece I struggled to come up with interesting things to do outside museums. The football museum is a must, and there are a dozen other good ones, the highlight for me being the Museu AfroBrasil.
But São Paulo’s appeal is in its night life and its shopping. Go to the high fashion stores on Oscar Freire, walk around Vila Madalena’s funky shops and galleries, and hit the town with Bahian food at Rota do Acaraje or tapas at Clos de Tapas, before drinking and dancing at Alberta #3 or Astronete or Lions.
The city tour bus is a nice idea if you live in Berlin or London, but one that is totally out of place with the reality of São Paulo.
It will, however, provide visitors with the quintissential São Paulo experience. You’ll spend hours stuck in traffic.
As I said last week in this Lula blog, many of my colleagues in both the Brazilian and international press are writing summaries of the departing president’s eight eventful years in power.
Paulo Cabral did this very detailed radio special on the BBC.
AP’s bureau chief in Brazil Bradley Brooks has this.
My first retrospective was a broad piece on the economy that came out in October in the KPMG’s magazine High Growth Markets.
Read it here. My article is on page 12.
Monocle are shifting their attention to São Paulo.
Nine months after the magazine wrote a special section about Rio de Janeiro, two writers came to South America’s biggest city to anchor a similar section.
I’ve written a few stories for the Monocolumn from São Paulo, this about the floods that besieged the city in January and this about the city’s expanding metro system.
And I got involved with the special section last week, writing reviews on the best bars and restaurants, suggesting top shops and hot chefs and reviewing some of the most important businesses in the city.
The format will be similar to that of the Rio section and I am covering much of the same topics.
Choosing restaurants was made easier because I’d done a similar thing last year for the Wall Street Journal. I hung out with Veja’s Restauranteur of the Year Paulo Barroso de Barros, the chef and owner at Due Cuochi, and we visited his 10 favourite restaurants (see my blog here with links to the Journal piece).
I am also writing about Embraer, which I’ve covered a few times recently for the Financial Times, including this piece for their Aerospace report.
And of course, this being Brazil, there’s an obligatory piece about football, which is always easy, and a pleasure, to cover.
The section is scheduled to come out in a couple of months.
A new stage of the SP metro opens next week and the city is celebrating. About 3.6km of track will open between the main Avenue Paulista and Faria Lima, a busy commercial street. It’s a important moment because it links two of the city’s key areas. It’s important enough that I wrote this story about it in Monocle magazine.
It also marks the first stage in the modernisation of SP transport system, a process that is long overdue. SP has only about 60 km of metro and light railways, less than much smaller cities such as Osaka, St Petersburg or Madrid.
Last week I interviewed José Luiz Portella, the state secretary of metropolitan transport, and he assured me that São Paulo would have 420 km of integrated metro and light railway by 2014, the year Brazil hosts the World Cup.
I have my doubts. Public works projects in Brazil take forever. They’ve been building a metro station near my house for two years now and it’s not scheduled to be ready for another four years. Two years after being chosen to host the World Cup they’ve still to start work on any of the stadiums.
What the hell takes them so long?
It’s an unfair comparison but Shanghai has added 190 km in the last six years and Beijing isn’t far behind. No one seriously expects São Paulo to match that kind of pace because unlike China it is a democracy with a functioning, if slow, justice system.
But the city is grinding to a halt because of traffic congestion and it isn’t moving nearly fast enough to solve the problems. It needs a larger and better public transport system and it needs it now.
That means getting rail lines laid quicker. It means less corruption and more competition in the tender process. And it means construction companies have to bite the bullet and slash their margins.
Most importantly, it means Brazilians need to pull together if they are serious about transforming their country into one that is truly modern and dynamic.
