terça-feira, 11 de fevereiro de 2014

Commuting

It's a little over 8am here. Yup, the morning commute. From my home to work it takes a little over 30mins. First I have to walk 250 metres to the station and "wulla" four stations later I have arrived.

I've noticed the pattern in commuting during peak and off-peak. Word of advice, don't try contemplating getting the train from Grajaú til Pinheiros, during the morning rush hour and vice-versa when finishing work.

One thing that I can say about the trains are Thank God they have aircon. Something as simple as that, you'd think it was the bare minimal to have in a tropical country.

São Paulo city has a population of well over 10 million people. So you can imagine how carriages are fully packed. In comparison to London, it's shocking. Atleast in London people have the common courtesy of waiting for the next tube if the current one is packed. Here on the otherhand, they push and shove you. Even when you can blatantly see that there is no more space inside the carriage some bozo always trys to creep in and force everyone else to become even more squished, like a tin of sardines.

When an empty train does arrive at an interconnecting station, the crowd run onto the train like a stampede of animals. At times, you can see actual smoke coming from both their ears and feet.

Commuting by bus. Atleast people form orderly queues for the bus. People here are more than happy to wait for the next empty bus in order to be guaranteed a seat. That's the surprising thing.
Bus drivers are nutsos, have you ever seen the film Speed, the one with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. The idea was to keep above a certain speed limit in order not to detonate a bomb. So the foot was down.
Yeah bus drivers drive like that here, utter nutters.

The metro, (as they say here) runs from 4am til midnight, Sunday to Friday and 4am til 1am on Saturdays. Sundays are pretty shitty on service as one comes every 10mins. Plus, they are always closing lines early for "maintenance" purposes. Those maintenance purposes better include fitting every carriage with aircon. Taking the metro during rush hour aint fun either. Same thing with the squishing inside carriages scenario.

Saying this and all, São Paulo is a big city with even more people residing here. So things are more expensive. Cars cost an arm, leg, eggs and sperm. It's ideal to have one, but you end up spending half of your life in traffic.

So transport in general, on the whole needs improving a lot more. It's a far cry from London. Let's hope that Brazil ups the anti and gets producing better quality modes of public transport and lower the taxes imposed on foreign cars entering this country. Otherwise I wont have anymore eggs left!

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