***rather big pause, was away from Sampa. back, trying to get back on the horse***
We are getting a free month of the Estado de São Paulo at home. We don't know what to do with this traditionally conservative newspaper. I am googling paper machê projects. Today's metro section, however, featured a number of stories about the São Paulo metro system, one of my pet interests.
The title of the lead article pretty much says a lot about the state of the São Paulo metro system. "Overfilled trains force Metro to close park and rides." Essentially, the metro had a project to create an integrated ticket that would include twenty-four hour parking and two metro rides (there and back). They had already rolled out two parking lots, but are going to have to cut the entire program because they can't encourage any more ridership during rush hours. How ridiculous is that!! To say that they are over capacity is putting it mildly. During rush hour, you can wait one or two trains to get on. And these trains are full to the brim, you're often touching multiple people, and there's no way around it.
The irony about this article is that it shows how far behind demand the metro system is, that it becomes impossible to plan how to one day meet that demand. Oddly enough, straight-forward solutions create new problems. A perfect example are transfer stations. In general, you want transfer stations (with two or more lines). This offers riders more flexibility, which means more circulation and fewer bottle-necks. In the past year, a new "yellow" line opened up, and was dubbed: "the transfer line" (a linha de baudiações). The yellow line would connect to all three existent subway lines, (blue, red, green) is planned to connect one day to the planned orange line (what will be the "line of the universities"), and also connects to one of the regional train lines (emerald). In theory, the yellow line was (among other things) supposed to ease the overloading of a section of the blue line that connected the red and green lines.
But what happened?
