A recent research confirmed people in Rio spend more time stuck in traffic jams than any other brazilian cities’s habitants. What it is means? In a day like sunday, with almost no traffic, we spend aproximately 35-40 minutes to get to the same place you’ll take 3 hours (or more) in a friday during the rush hour. It’s just bizarre, because people need to get home anyway. And what to do? Looks like we have no options in transport, but the truth is we do: we have BRT, trains, barges and also subways, but a very poor investment on them, which turn all of these facilities saturated, absolutely crowded, and more prone to accidents. I’ll give you an exemple of poor investment: while Rio took impressive 44 years to have 40.9 km of subway extension, Shangai went from zero to 439 km in ten years. Besides it the bike lanes in here are completely disrespected, not by the cyclists who fought a lot to get those, but by people who park cars over it and don’t even respect the law that determines a secure distance between them, that said, it’s not unusual to see in the news a report about a cyclist who got hit by a car and died. People don’t feel safe to try these ‘green alternatives’. We live a day by day lack of respect in traffic. But we definitely need to do something about, because in two years, we’ll receive the whole world to the olympics, and we have not any infrastructure to do it by now. Isn’t is shocking? The informations over here get close to zero in the streets to help tourists, if you need a bus, you almost need to figure it out by yourself where it stops. And if you pick a taxi, you may wonder? Well, it´s not that safe for your pocket. Not that the driver will point a gun at you, or something like it, but he may take you to take a tour over Rio without you knowing it, and turning your ride expensive as hell. They do it even when you live here and doesn’t know exactly what is the shortest route to take. Yes, people, we need a lot of changes around here. And I would not know where to start.

 
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