A city with 180km traffic jams

&#62; "No city in the world will ever manage to end congestion because when traffic flows, people are drawn to their cars.<p>Tokyo is proof that this is not true. There are many, many people who own cars but only drive them on the weekends because the public transportation system is so great.

"A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation." @petrogustavo Mayor of Bogota<p>As a brazilian from São Paulo, who nowadays lives in Europe, I can confirm that. That kind of traffic is unsustainable. It doesn't matter how much of a good job you have, if you have to face this routine every day, your life WILL suck.

"No city in the world will ever manage to end congestion because when traffic flows, people are drawn to their cars." - I disagree with this statement. There may be something about São Paulo that makes this true, but it's not a guaranteed universal truth.<p>Vancouver, British Columbia has taken an interesting approach - they don't run freeways into the city, and have, over the last 40 years, zoned a large stock of residential units in the downtown/west side of the city.<p>The goal is "Live where you work."<p>People still commute by car, and skytrain - but, in general, there is an approach to ending congestion. Affordable, high quality, inconvenient mass transit is a large factor. But, generally, just avoiding having to travel long distances to get to work is another.

Deficient public transit systems create areas where owning a car is THE thing that lets you into the middle class - this is bad for the environment, bad for traffic, and creates a barrier to social upward movement. Here on Long Island in New York, the bus system only serves /certain/ areas and the train system (Long Island Railroad) is expensive and designed to bring people to and from Manhattan and back and does anything else quite poorly.<p>p.s. Anyone remember the Doctor Who episode Gridlock - where people actually lived and died in traffic? (:

Here you can check traffic in Paris and its suburbs: <a href="http://www.sytadin.fr/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sytadin.fr/</a> Last friday night there were 350km of traffic jams.<p>Looking at the "barometer"( <a href="http://www.sytadin.fr/opencms/sites/sytadin/sys/courbes/courbe_cumul.jsp.html_63.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.sytadin.fr/opencms/sites/sytadin/sys/courbes/cour...</a> ) you can see that 200km of traffic jams is a daily occurence.

Part of the problem is human psychology where people do not rationally put a value on the time spent commuting. For instance say you are offered job A at $60k/yr and the commute is 30min. You also are offered job B at $75k/yr but the commute is 1h30min.<p>Most people would choose job B because they don't put enough value on their time (a similar argument goes for waiting in line at the gas station to save a few cents per litre/gallon) but is magnified here by the over discounting of future time. All we see is the extra $15k.<p>With an average of 2080hrs working hours per year, your time in this situation is valued at $30/hr (not talking about taxes). The additional 2hrs commuting per working day results in 520 extra hours which works out to the $15k difference.<p>Of course if you LIKE driving in traffic because that is how you catchup on your podcasts, practice singing or harmonica, good on you :)

I used to live in São Paulo and I moved in the exact same path the girl in the article. Up from the North Zone all the way across the city to the South Zone. Without traffic, during the night this would take me 30min but during a normal day it would take 1.5 to 2 hours to get to work and the way back was even worse. On Fridays it get's even worse as people tend to use cars so they can hang out after work.<p>I did that for 2 years and moved to Canada a year ago. I know the situation got a lot worse recently, although I can't tell why.<p>This is really a pity. São Paulo is really one of the most exciting and thriving cities I have ever been on. The nightlife is awesome and it's a great place to work. The traffic jams are by far the worst problem the city have.<p>I agree with the article that public transportation is a solution. We have a large subway system, it's not the longest of the world but it's the one with more passengers per mile, also known as the tuna can coefficient. Getting around using the bus or subways is often more painful than on a car.<p>If you ever go to São Paulo get a place near where you work. If you don't you will have a bad time.

Traffic is the #1 cause of unhappiness in the world. Move yourself close to work, even if you have to pay the premium. Do not put a price tag on your happiness.

Couple of fun data points:<p>I grew up in Caracas, where traffic was just as bad. It would take me ~1 hour to get to school in the morning, and 2-3 hours to get back home during rush hour. My school was only 6 miles away. Caracas is a terrible city to bike in (very hilly and unsafe).<p>Traffic was so slow that people would walk the highways selling stuff to bored drivers. What would they sell? Apart from snacks, you could fancy yourself a beer or a copy of the lastest leaked celebrity sex tape...<p>In Bogota, to control traffic, the government only allowed you to use your car on certain days/hours depending on your license plate. Otherwise you'd be fined. Very constraining IMO, but it seemed to work to some extent.

We suffer the same here in Istanbul. And to solve this they heavily construct more streets and bridges instead of invest on public transportation infrastructure. It is insane, because more streets means more cars and therefore more jams in the long-term.

My city, Warsaw (the capital of Poland), is being mentioned as the worst in the Europe. The commute here is really painful -- and we're only a ~2 million people city.<p>It's not unusual for a 10km bus trip to take over an hour. Commuting from the suburbs is even worse. My guess, our greatest problem is the lack of carpooling culture. Rarely I see people sharing a car, usually it's just the driver.<p>I can only imagine how bad it is in Sao Paulo which is twice as densely populated.

I've commuted by bicycle in both San Francisco and São Paulo and the claim that one city is far less safe than another is simply not true.<p>It's about about changing your riding style, your routes and determining where you will and will not bike.<p>In SF, the roads are safer for bikes, so you spend more time on the roads. In SP, the roads are less safe for bikes and pedestrians, so 99% of people are in cars or buses. This fortunately leaves 90%+ of sidewalks wide open to use as a bike lane.<p>The simple rule of being able to bike safely is "If I can walk safely from point A to point B, then I can also use that same route to bike safely"<p>If anything, the 180km of stopped traffic makes SP in many ways safer than SF. Biking through SP during rush hour is like biking through the Disneyland parking lot.

Two hours to go ten miles? Ridiculous! You might as well get out and walk. Riding a bicycle would cut that in half, easily, even in a place like Sao Paolo.<p>This reminds me of reading about a practice in the epic traffic jams around Beijing and Shanghai. Two guys on a scooter will cut through the traffic jam and one will offer to "car sit" for you while the guy with the scooter drives you to work.<p><a href="http://gizmodo.com/5738525/chinese-motorists-are-paying-people-to-sit-in-traffic-jams-for-them" rel="nofollow">http://gizmodo.com/5738525/chinese-motorists-are-paying-peop...</a>

Jesus, and here I thought Toronto was bad during rush hour. That's insane.<p>Interesting the divide in class aspirations for a car vs. helicopters for the super rich.

I'm starting to feel this way about the traffic in the Bay Area. I moved back here after living in New York for four years and am absolutely astounded by how bad the traffic has gotten. It takes me upwards of an hour and a half to get from my house in San Jose to my office in Menlo Park (a distance of ~30 miles.) Definitely makes me miss the amazing public transit infrastructure back east.

Why the hell is anybody still driving then? Surely after sitting in traffic for half a dozen hours a couple of times inspiration strikes and you buy a motorbike?

Business opportunity: Run around on a bicycle selling snack foods and other products to people stuck in traffic.

MOVE.<p>Downvoters: I had a 2-hour-each-way commute too. It sucked. I moved.