Blueprint America

Bryan Myers, Worldfocus Producer

Ask an American what comes to mind when they hear the words “road trip,” and they are likely to mention things like “adventure” and “freedom.”  Mention those words to a Brazilian, and you’re more likely to hear things like “ordeal” and “frustration.”  Simply put, driving long distances in Brazil can be a trying experience.

Although Brazil is almost the size of the United States, it doesn’t have nearly as many major highways.  Apart from areas around Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, most roads labeled as “highways” are actually two lane roads.  Many of them are in poor shape.  Adding to Brazil’s highway headaches are the large number of 18 wheelers on the road—in Brazil, most goods are shipped by truck.

But if Brazil’s president has his way, that’s all about to change.  Last year, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced the most ambitious plan to overhaul the nation’s infrastructure in Brazilian history.  Lula’s plan calls for spending over $250 billion on infrastructure projects by the year 2010.  $17 billion of that will go towards fixing roads.

Lula’s plan couldn’t come at a more crucial time.  Along with China and India, Brazil is one of the world’s hottest economies.  Much of its new found wealth is the result of exporting commodities like iron ore, coffee, and soybeans.  In turn, a newly prosperous middle class is hungry for imports of consumer goods.  Timely shipments are essential to keeping the wheels of commerce turning.  According to Pedro Bastos, an investment officer based in Brazil for the financial services firm HSBC, “We need to invest in highways, rail networks, and airports.  We need to improve our infrastructure to take our harvests to ports or processing centers.  And frankly, we didn’t invest when we needed to.”

I, along with several other members of the Worldfocus team, spent several days traveling Brazil’s highways, talking with motorists and truckers.  Many of them couldn’t agree more.  Typical of their views were those of one trucker who delivers eucalyptus wood from Brazil’s central coast to brick kilns near Rio de Janeiro.  He’s been driving the same shoddy road for 34 years.  He said it was about time the government did something, and told us he’s looking forward to the day his trip goes a little smoother and a little faster.

However, we did meet one trucker who wasn’t buying it.  He said he thought the government was “lying,” saying that officials have a long history of announcing ambitious plans, only for them to result in nothing.  He’ll believe it when he sees it, he said.

One of the roads high on the government’s priority list for improvement is the BR 101. The BR 101 is a two lane road that leads into the important port of Sepetiba, just south of Rio de Janeiro.  As it is, the road has trouble handling all the trucks trying to get into the port.  The sight of trucks lined up idling alongside the road is common.  The 101 is now being widened to four lanes; that work appears to be well along to completion.

Eventually, the government hopes to connect the 101 with another road on the opposite side of Rio de Janeiro, the BR 493.  The 493 is also a narrow two lane, full of bumps and swales, and it too is slated for improvement.  The goal of connecting the 101 and 493?  To eventually form a bypass around Rio de Janeiro, solving another problem, that of trucks have to pass through the city.

Some of the $250 billion dollars Lula wants to spend on Brazil’s infrastructure will come from public coffers.  But the rest is expected to come from private investment.  This effort to enlist private companies has some wondering whether Brazil’s poorer citizens will literally be relegated to the slow lane.

As part of its plan to enlist private companies, the Brazilian government has leased several of its major highways to private companies, making those companies responsible for maintenance and repairs and, in return, allowing them to collect tolls.  Currently, seven stretches of Brazilian highway are in private hands, and that number is expected to grow.

The tolls aren’t cheap.  We took a drive on a highway that has already been privatized, the Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo highway.  We paid twenty US dollars for the privilege of driving about 175 miles.  That amounts to the daily take home pay of the average Brazilian.

We also visited a highway that was being repaired in anticipation of being privatized, a highway running north from Rio de Janeiro to the town of Campos.  A road crew was busy repaving the roadway with a soupy mixture of oil and stone, not the dense macadam Americans are used to seeing on their highways.  The crew’s foreman told us once his bosses put their toll booths in place, some of the members of his crew probably wouldn’t be able to afford to drive the very road they were helping to fix.

The debate about turning highways over to private hands mirrors one happening in America.  Here too, some state and local governments are trying to privatize roads.  A recent effort by officials in Pennsylvania to lease the Pennsylvania Turnpike—the first major road ever built in America—to a consortium led by banking giant Citigroup has been met with stiff resistance.

In America at least, many believe the push to privatize flies in the face of the concept of “public works.”  Last year, a poll of Pennsylvania drivers showed the majority opposed to the idea.  Many of them seem to agree with Adam Smith, the man who first articulated the concept of free market capitalism, when he wrote that governments should provide some things to all its citizens, public works like roads being one of them.

Back in Brazil, we asked a contractor in charge of work on the BR 101 near the port of Sepetiba about all this.  He told us that even if the poor can’t afford to pay tolls, they would still benefit.  The poor, he said, don’t even own cars, so for them, the issue of tolls was moot.  However, he said they do take buses and that bus accidents are a big problem in Brazil.  So, he said, anything that makes the roads safer will also help the poor.

After we finished our interview, we hopped into our car and drove off.  About five miles up the road we saw a bus overturned, lying in a ditch on the side of a road.  The passengers had already been evacuated and the bus didn’t appear to be heavily damaged, but it served as an eerie reminder of the contractor’s words.