Understanding continuity in sustainable transport planning in Curitiba

Introduction

The metropolitan region of Curitiba, in the south of Brazil, seems to be a propitious case for the appreciation of the challenges involved in planning and implementing sustainable transport policies in a metropolitan context. As a case study, Curitiba has been recognised worldwide as a successful story of urban planning. This success is, of course, particularly well known in the transport sector, where rational urban planning (Hall, 1995), priority given to public transit and transport–land use coordination were achieved with substantial success (Mees, 2010; Newman and Kenworthy, 1996: 1–22), as evidenced by an impressive modal split for public transit (Mees, 2010; Rabinovitch, 1992: 62–73; Rabinovitch and Leitman, 1996: 46–54). According to a comparative survey conducted by the Corporación Andina de Fomento (2010), buses and non-motorised trips represent 70% of the total trips in the city of Curitiba itself, and 28% in the larger metropolitan area. These figures represent a substantial achievement. They considerably limit transport-related energy consumption per capita and, when combined with extended use of biofuel buses and hybrid buses, actually curb CO₂ emissions for the city (Carvalho et al., 2012; I.C.L.E.I. Local Governments for Sustainability, 2011).

Curitiba’s transport success was achieved over several decades, through demographic, institutional and even constitutional changes. Regarding Curitiba’s institutional framework, there are numerous narratives about how it achieved its transport and land planning success.

One narrative tells the story of a city ruled in a technocratic, top-down institutional mode, inspired by the national cultural context of military rule. For some, Curitiba was chosen as a ‘model-city’ by the military regime, as the urban version of the national economic ‘miracle’ of the 1970s, a period of economic growth led by a technocratic military dictatorship (Sánchez and Moura, 2005). Although that narrative is partly true, especially for Curitiba’s early successes, we must go beyond ‘strong leadership’ to explain Curitiba’s success (Ardila-Gómez, 2004: 13). If it is true that the implementation of the Master Plan of 1965 began under a mayor appointed by the military regime (Jaime Lerner, 1971–1975), it has continued under the administration of the same political group elected for four consecutive terms.

Even during the military regime the public had some influence on the outcome of decisions and policies (Ardila-Gómez, 2004: 396) – during the elaboration of the Master Plan, through public meetings, and in the late 1970s, after the re-democratisation, through public manifestations and organised popular movements (Neves, 2006).

The story of urban transport planning cannot be told without some reference to IPPUC (Appendix 1 offers a list of institutions, acronyms and policies), the research and planning autonomous agency created in 1965, positioned directly under the mayor, which became a primus inter pares and the lead agency in the Curitiba success story; and to URBS, created in 1963 and since 1986 the single authority responsible for the construction of bus stations and stops, bus corridors and the operation of the transport system.

In summing up Curitiba’s institutional framework for successful urban transport, we can conclude that it was essentially through proactive and interventionist processes that the city reached its goals. In particular, the city’s success in joining land use and transport policy together, so difficult in most other cities in the world, was achieved with quite direct and forceful policies.

However, in the early part of the 21st century, a new generation of challenges and problems appear on the radar of large cities all around the world. These challenges appear to be quite different from those successfully dealt with by Curitiba authorities in the past. Although there are varying lists of those emerging challenges, let us point to two of them which might challenge Curitiba in a particular way.

First, like many cities around the world, there is ‘a more fragmented national space, characterized by a series of … competitive regions directly connected to the international economy’ (Klink and Denaldi, 2012: 548) an economic environment in which the central city may be at economic odds with smaller cities within its own metropolitan region. At the same time, there is the challenge of demographic growth occurring mainly in suburban and even surrounding areas (Lima and Mendonça, 2001), creating new challenges for urban transport and increased needs for mobility.

Second, there are increased democratic aspirations challenging the more top-down processes of the centralised city government ruled by functional and technical rationalities (Frey, 2012); and in this scenario, a wider variety of state and non-state actors, NGO’s, private firms, interest groups or voluntary associations emerge as relevant stakeholders (Mayntz, 2006: 18–25), and the potential partners often want to participate in the decision-making process. In portions of the literature on public policy and policy instruments, there is the suggestion that these emerging types of challenges, often related to environmental challenges, require policy tools which are different, less direct and more interactive (Howlett, 2001: 304; Jordan et al., 2003; Kassim and Le Galès, 2010; Salamon, 2002), although this position is by no means unanimous.

We can define ‘policy tools’ as a means of action by which a government can guide individual and collective actors to take decisions and lead them to take actions that are compatible with the objectives of the public policies it pursues (Varone, 2000). When the policy tools are less direct, more flexible and require more interaction between participants, they are often referred to as ‘governance’ patterns, as opposed to ‘government’ ones (Salamon, 2002).

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the present choice of policy instruments in use for transport policies in Curitiba in order to determine whether or not the city is relying on more interactive, participative and less direct policy tools to implement its policy goals. In other words, the choice of policy instruments will constitute a tracer – or witness – to evaluate change or continuity in Curitiba’s policy mode in sustainable urban transport.

Our conclusion, based on the study of policy instruments, supported by documentary and comparative data, will show that Curitiba is still basically relying on proactive and direct instruments to assure its continued success in sustainable urban transport.

Emerging challenges for Curitiba: Institutional context

In addition to the challenges outlined above, and which we may find in different developed and developing countries, Curitiba also faces its own particular institutional challenges, some of which are shared with other Brazilian metropolitan areas. The landmark Brazilian Constitution of 1988, which formed the basis for moving away from military rule and towards full democratic status, while promoting democracy through the recognition of the independence of the municipal level of government, was not necessarily conducive to effective metropolitan governance, and may even have hindered it. Indeed, while the metropolitan areas around cities are experiencing a vertiginous demographic expansion, fast becoming one of the most urgent urban problems in the country, they are not recognised as one of the three levels of government (the Union (Brazil), each of the 27 states, and each of the 5565 municipalities). Even though nine metropolitan regions have seen their existence and importance recognised in 1973, they possess no recognised political or administrative power, and they operate under a patchwork of municipal and state legislation. This creates some difficulty in the managing and financing of a transport system integrated at the metropolitan level, as is the case of Curitiba. Although the real transportation challenges are of a metropolitan scale, and although the national City Statute of 2001 – one of the most acclaimed urban laws in recent times (Fernandes, 2007: 201–219) – determined that every city with more than 500,000 inhabitants must elaborate a mobility plan which must refer to its metropolitan context, no institutional or policy instrument was presented for implementing and supporting this planning process at the metropolitan level. The more recent Urban Mobility Statute of 2012 (Brasil Ministerio das Cidades, 2012) does not really address this particular challenge, and it is too early to see if the proposed Metropolis Statute (still under discussion) will prove to be a game changer.

Meanwhile, in the case of the Metropolitan Region of Curitiba (RMC in Portuguese), although Curitiba itself still represents 60% of the urban population of the metropolitan region, and 70% of the GDP, the surrounding metropolitan municipalities have seen their population increase steadily more than the central city for the past 20 years (Ipardes, 2011). Without real and effective metropolitan governance, metropolitan-wide transport coordination tends to be fragmented more than before.

In the early 1980s, Curitiba started expanding its municipal transport initiatives to the surrounding cities with a steep population growth, creating the Integrated Transport Network (RIT for Rede Integrada de Transporte), based on the already established integrated feeder-trunk lines and single fare system.

If this move was beneficial for the continuously growing number of users living in the surrounding cities, it also reinforced the economic (inter) dependency of peripheral cities on the capital. Indeed, as economic migration of the poor from the Curitiba centre to the hinterland has intensified in recent years (Leitão, 2010), most of the peripheral residents are in a dependent economic relation vis-à-vis the core city. And as many of them are in fact ‘dormitory cities’, they exert a growing demand for mobility at a metropolitan scale – almost 25% of the 2.3 million daily trips of the integrated network (RIT) are generated outside Curitiba. However, since the transport network (RIT) is mainly managed by the city’s agency (URBS), each demand for expansion of the integrated network is seen, from Curitiba’s perspective, as a financial burden. Although RIT receives about 60 million reais (2.4 reais = US$1) per year in subsidies from the state government (Parana) to keep the metropolitan fare at 2.7 reais (while the cost is at 3.13 reais), Curitiba is responsible for 34% of the total budget (Ipardes, 2011) even though the increases are principally due to the more costly metropolitan service.

As a result, a multi-stakeholder environment with an increased competition among cities, city-regions and states now characterises the transport sector in Curitiba to a larger extent than previously. Moreover, as the RIT is planned and managed by a municipal agency of Curitiba (URBS), its attributions conflict with those of the state of Paraná’s agency responsible for the metropolitan planning, COMEC (Coordenação da Região Metropolitana de Curitiba), often creating deadlock situations. As an example, the Curitiba’s mobility plan, elaborated in 2008 but never voted on by the city council, does not mention the metropolitan region, while COMEC’s metropolitan plan does not make any reference to Curitiba’s needs for transit.

These more recent observations suggest that the interaction required for these emerging challenges is not happening between city authorities and metropolitan ones, although, in all fairness to Curitiba, the conversation between these two institutional levels is a sizeable challenge everywhere (Hull, 2008: 98), with relatively few models of success.

Responding to emerging challenges through policy instruments

If a brief survey of Curitiba’s current institutional context does not suggest the flexible, consultative and indirect processes presumably required for the emerging challenges of metropolitanisation and increased aspirations for civic participation, what would a closer and more systematic study of the current situation reveal?

As we have suggested in the introduction, we propose to realise this more empirical study through an evaluation of the policy tools currently in use in Curitiba’s transport policies.

We have defined, earlier, policy tools (or ‘instruments’) as a set of means of action by which a government can guide individual and collective actors towards policy goals (Varone, 2000), and they can include more direct means, such as land use regulation and infrastructure construction, and more indirect means, such as consultative processes and information gathering. In achieving its transport successes, Curitiba is reputed to have predominantly used direct tools (Ardila-Gómez, 2004), but it appears that the current challenges would require more flexible and interactive ones, partly because there is no set hierarchic line of command between the metropolitan level and the city authorities.

Because these types of situations, in conjunction with increased aspirations for civic participation, are seen to have increased in the relatively recent past, particularly in public policies related to environmental matters (Jordan et al., 2005), the use of these more indirect policy tools has also increased (Howlett, 2001: 304; Jessop, 2003; Kassim and Le Galès, 2010),

In the literature on public policy, the emergence of these more flexible policy instruments is often seen as ‘tracers’ or witnesses to a more general trend toward ‘governance’. In academic and in policy-making circles, governance is often contrasted with ‘government’ (Jordan et al., 2003: 202), a policy mode more in tune with the more direct intervention style.

Admittedly, the distinction between ‘governance’ and ‘government’ can be somewhat artificial, and no doubt governments make ample use of both direct and indirect government instruments. Even in fields related to environmental matters, direct regulation remains the principal policy instrument (Jordan et al., 2003: 214).

Our interest in governance is only indirect, because our main goal is the presence (or absence) of the policy instruments generally associated with it in the literature. In addition, we would like to contribute to an emerging trend in some recent studies which consider the case of Curitiba in the light of its policy tools choice features (Klink and Denaldi, 2012).

In the following section, we will present the bases of our empirical study of the choice of policy instruments currently in use for the contemporary Curitiba transport challenges.

A model of instrument choice for sustainable urban transport

In trying to determine the presence (or absence) of the more flexible, interactive and participative tools in current transport policies in Curitiba, or elsewhere, we needed to rely on a classification of instruments which would include them as one element among others, and that classification would also include the more proactive, direct instruments.

Because there is no agreement upon classification of policy instruments (sometimes called ‘tools’) in general (Hood, 2007; Vedung, 1998: 22), and even less so for sustainable urban transport policy tools (Hull, 2008; Santos et al., 2010), we developed our own classification scheme, specifically for the case of comprehensive urban transport policies. We also wanted our classification scheme to take into consideration, theoretically, some of the elements we consider important in the current urban scenario, metropolitanisation and emerging aspiration for civic participation.

The classification mode we propose is entirely built upon Pierre and Peters’ structural observation that ‘in modern society, government is still responsible, yet at the same time is less capable of acting alone’ (Pierre and Peters, 2000: 83). To obtain the necessary information to attend to its tasks, it must ‘seek contact different stakeholders’. Yet, the state remains primus inter pares, in these exchanges because ‘it is the only player in the (governance) policy process which can rightfully claim to have a political, legitimate mandate’ (emphasis added).

In summing up the contemporary situation of policy challenges, we can state that non-governmental actors often possess an advantage in information/knowledge, sometimes temporary, while governments have an advantage in legitimacy. In technical terms, these are called ‘asymmetries’ and, hence, we have an asymmetry of information often favouring non-governmental actors, while we also have an asymmetry of legitimacy in favour of public authorities. The degree of these asymmetries can vary, giving way to a four-part matrix of policy instruments, as presented in Figure 1: Self-regulative, Informative/Limited action, Proactive and, finally, Interactive/Governance. As a starting point, and based on the evolving configuration of information and legitimacy, we expected that our four-part matrix would unfold in the same order in time, with the Self-regulative tools opening up the process and the Interactive/Governance ones closing it. Even though our empirical data will partly disconfirm this presumed order, it seemed a useful heuristic starting point to classify instruments and to see how instruments would unfold over time.

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Figure 1.

List of instruments presented to interviewees, classified according to the four phases of our model of instrument choice.

Let us now go through these four phases, in the order just outlined, with a brief description of the instruments used in each one for sustainable transport policy, as illustrated in Figure 1.

In the Self-regulative phase, when public authorities have limited knowledge and have not yet developed strong legitimacy on specific challenges, the problems of sustainable urban transport are addressed through weak policies such as energy-saving devices on automobiles, where public authorities would only minimally intervene in these private initiatives, usually of a voluntary nature.

In the Informative/Limited action phase (where the limited actions are essentially of an information-seeking nature), public authorities become more aware of the policy problem and challenge, and seek more information about its dynamics, moving to close the gap between itself and non-governmental actors, even to the point of knowing more, on several dimensions, than interested non-governmental stakeholders. The instruments used here can vary from information gathering on traffic flows and on alternative travel choices, public consultations of an informative nature, and finally, with continued increases in information and legitimacy, information dissemination and advertisement. In the case of Curitiba, historically, there is no doubt that the two main planning and transport agencies, IPPUC and URBS, made ample use of these information instruments.

The Proactive phase is where public authorities have the strongest position, having gained in information and knowledge in the previous phase, then using this acquired knowledge in conjunction with their growing legitimacy. The public sector is now set to intervene forcefully, capable of using all the coercive tools in its repertoire: growing levels of coercive rule-making, in terms of land use constraints and regulation for example, and, ultimately, constructing and operating directly or through agents sizeable public infrastructures, such as bus lines, light rail, suburban rail or subways. Taking a large historical perspective, these proactive instruments are reputed to have been important and essential to Curitiba’s transport success (Ardila-Gómez, 2004).

The presence of our last category of instruments of the Interactive/Governance phase is particularly important, because it does refer to instruments which we described earlier as flexible, interactive and participative, presumed to be pertinent to the emerging challenges of metropolitanisation and increased aspirations for participation.

The instruments used here are of two types. There is, first, a political-institutional type of interaction and participation, where public authorities initiate negotiations with interested parties involved more or less directly with the implementation, for example, of a sustainable urban transport plan. Second, there is the use of interactive economic instruments, incentives and disincentives and, ultimately, market instruments in the form of eco-taxes on gasoline, differential taxation based on specific development locations, increased taxes on gas guzzlers and high parking fees in the downtown core. These interactive economic instruments are generally included in the governance type instruments (Jordan et al., 2003), because, although they are based on government authority and initiated by government, they are seen as flexible because they eventually depend for their success on non-governmental users, just as the political-institutional types of interaction do.

The move to the Interactive/Governance phase can be explained by a new configuration between information and legitimacy, where governments, although enjoying high levels of legitimacy, need public participation and flexibility in the implementation of more complex and actor-dependent policies.

Empirical data on Curitiba’s instrument choice

Although we are interested in the long-term evolution of the choice of policy instruments in Curitiba, the empirical data that will concern us in the present section are limited to the choice and short-term succession of policy instruments presently in use in Curitiba’s current transport policies.

To answer these questions, we will be relying on: (1) categorical data drawn from interviews; (2) qualitative data drawn from interviews; (3) available documentary data from current studies on transport in Curitiba; and, finally, (4) some preliminary comparative data coming from our study of large cities of the Americas, also successful in having implemented sustainable urban transport. There are preliminary results of this larger study which permit some limited empirical comparison with Curitiba.

Data presented here, both the categorical data and the qualitative data, come from semi-structured interviews. The interviewees were chosen following a ‘snowball’ procedure, often drawing incrementally our interviewees from suggestions made by our first interviewees. The interviews were done in two periods: the first round, with 12 interviews, was conducted in June of 2011, and a second round, with six interviews, was conducted in February and March of 2012. In order to address the metropolitan scale, interviewees are chosen among key informants from the different territorial levels which influence metropolitan transport policies in Brazil, more specifically representatives of the federal level, state (including regional) authorities from the state of Paraná, informants from municipal governments in and around Curitiba, and finally representatives from interest and citizen groups.

Curitiba, in following its decades-long tradition, has a comprehensive transport policy, which is however made up of different dimensions and subpolicies. Each respondent was invited to refer to the transport policies influencing the metropolitan region of Curitiba with which he or she was familiar through first-hand knowledge. These policies essentially concerned the federal programme for urban mobility, the implementation of the Green Line (Linha Verde), the Paraná Climate Change Plan and the Vehicle Pollution Control Plan, as well as Curitiba’s two latest mobility plans, which were the exclusive focus of the second round of interviews: the Integrated Development Plan of the Metropolitan Region (PDI, 2006) and the PlanMob of 2008. Some recent federal government policies have proposed new elements for urban and regional planning in the country, and regarding transport, the federal programme for urban mobility is the most comprehensive one. The Green Line follows the same model of the Curitiba’s BRT axes; however, it is the conversion of a federal highway into a metropolitan axis. Although the state has no direct power over urban transport in Brazil, the climate change plan and the vehicle pollution control plan establish a legal framework within which the municipalities must develop their mobility plans. Finally, being more specific regarding the metropolitan case of Curitiba, the PDI and the PlanMob are the reference plans for implementing more concrete projects regarding the metropolitan region and the city of Curitiba.

Nevertheless, as those plans have mutual influence, each interview does not deal with a single programme.

Categorical data in instrument use

Respondents were presented with a list of policy instruments for sustainable urban transport, identical to those presented in Figure 1, each of which could be classified in one of our four categories or phases, and were asked to identify the five (or less) most frequently selected instruments in the transport policy area they know best, and to specify if these instruments were used in the beginning, the middle or in the end of the policy process. The addition of a time dimension was hoped to shed light on the sequencing of the instrument selection in Curitiba’s policies. The specific wording of the question is presented in Appendix 2. We then restated and recoded the answers according to the general categories of Figure 1.

The distribution of the answers to our first question, on the instruments most resorted to, reveals that an important proportion of all instruments used in the recent past in the transport planning of Curitiba (44%), as identified by our respondents, have fallen in one of the four subcategories of the Proactive type instruments, as presented in Figure 1. The data indeed indicate a strong presence of the proactive type of instruments, far ahead of all the other types of instruments: Self-regulative (7%), Informative/Limited action (26%) and Interactive/Governance ones (20%).

The frequency of the Interactive/Governance economic instruments is low. Indeed, in all of the instruments mentioned by the respondents, only three belong in the economic incentives category and only two belong to the economic disincentives category, and we have found no mention at all of the market instruments mentioned as ‘User fees’. These basic statistics suggest that the Proactive type of tools is largely dominant in current and recent Curitiba transport policies.

Let us now look at our second categorical question, the sequencing (over time) of the instruments selected in Curitiba’s policies.

The inclusion of a time dimension in the selection of instruments by key informants allowed us to represent the sequencing of instrument selection in the respondent’s policy. Thus, instruments that were used in the beginning of the policy process were coded ‘1’ by our respondent, instruments that were used while the policy was in progress were coded with the number ‘2’, and finally, instruments that were used at the end of the policy process were coded with the number ‘3’, as indicated in Appendix 2.

Table 1 illustrates the sequencing over time of the use of different instruments in recent transport policies for the city of Curitiba. The most frequently selected instruments in the three stages of policies are those representing the Proactive type of instruments. These Proactive tools are strongly concentrated at the first two stages of the policy development, somewhat as expected, but they still dominate the last stage of the policy process, in relation to other types of instruments. As expected, the Informative/Limited action tools drop sharply between the first two phases and the last. The Interactive/Governance instruments are not numerous in numbers, although they are timidly present at all phases of the policy process, and grow somewhat in proportion to total instruments in the last phase, which is also expected, to the point of slightly eclipsing the Informative/Limited action instruments.

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Table 1.

Respondents’ answers on instrument choice and sequencing by types of policy tools.

Type of tools	Sequencing
	[1] Beginning	[2] In progress	[3] End
Self-regulative	2	0	2
Informative	8	9	3
Proactive	12	13	7
Interactive	4	6	4
Total	26	28	16

Note: The total row exceeds the total of instruments analysed because some instruments were identified by our respondents to be in two or three phases of the policy process at the same time (e.g.: 1–2, or 1–2–3). In these cases, the instruments were individually added in each of the phases mentioned.

However, the overall picture of instrument sequencing is more one of trial and error and frequent regressions than of the orderly and linear sequence predicted.

In short, the Proactive tools for current transport policies in Curitiba remain important, and they are present at all phases of the implementation processes.

Let us now look beyond the categorical data, and seek qualitative data on the same themes.

Preliminary comparative data

At this point, it must be pointed out that our study of Curitiba is part of a larger project on instrument choice in successful transport cities of the Americas. Four other cities were also examined, using among other sources, the exact same interview protocol and the same proportion of national, state (province), metropolitan, city and interest groups representatives. These four other cities are: Chicago, Seattle, Montreal and Toronto.

These five cities, including Curitiba, can be compared on several different dimensions. Here, we will limit our comparison to the use of the four categories of instruments presented earlier (Self-regulative, Informative/Limited action, Proactive and Interactive/Governance instruments).

If we add each instrument identified by the respondents in each city, and classify them according to the classification of the four categories, we have, as a result, varying totals regarding the use of each of the four categories of instruments. Even though there are variations between our four other cities, the data show that Curitiba uses almost twice as often the proactive instruments than the average of the other four cities, and almost twice as less frequently the Interactive/Governance ones, as illustrated in Figure 2.

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Figure 2.

Instrument type by city.

Although comparative data remain a delicate undertaking, if only for language differences and nuances, the conclusion is that this comparison appears to confirm our previous observation, which is that there is a continued reliance on proactive policy instruments in contemporary comprehensive transport policies in Curitiba.

Discussion of results

Although all of our empirical and documentary data point to the same conclusion, which is the continued importance of the Proactive-Government mode of operation for current sustainable transport in Curitiba, additional comments are in order.

The policy style of Curitiba’s current transport challenges, as measured, in particular, by its use of policy instruments, seems to be in a ‘holding pattern’, a situation of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ (Denzau and North, 1994: 23) or inertia (Williamson, 2000: 597) or, more modestly, in a ‘path dependency of instruments’ position. At the level of countries, ‘there seems to be a fairly persistent national repertoire of instruments’ (Jordan et al., 2003: 218) and although path dependencies have been rarely applied in urban settings (Pflieger et al., 2009: 1423), it very much seems Curitiba has stayed faithful to the policy instruments which were instrumental to its decades-long successes.

Yet, although they are presently not sufficiently strong to change the traditional policy processes, there are signs that a move to more interactive, flexible and interactive instruments is not at all unlikely. We find signs of this move in the presence of some interactive instruments in present transportation policies, in the critical tone of the interviews, and in some more recent institutional developments.

From an institutional point of view, for example, we must also take into account the fact that some consultation is now mandatory for the City Statute, through the Urban Mobility Statute, the PDI 2006 Plan and the 2008 PlanMob, although these overtures can be considered as ‘rules-in-form’, not necessarily ‘rules-in-use’.

The elaboration of PlanMob was achieved in a collaborative way between the state planning agency, IPPUC, many other governmental agencies, as well as a large private Brazilian research institute based in Rio de Janeiro – Fundação Getulio Vargas. Outside participants were thus consulted for their expertise and knowledge, as governance literature would predict. Nevertheless, these are institutional participants which were mainly selected by IPPUC itself. Only in a few opportunities, and following the minimum mandated by national laws, was the plan openly discussed with the population.

Even though we can identify some emerging and somewhat timid patterns of governance, it must be pointed out that these kinds of transformations may take decades to develop (Carey and Low, 2012; Williamson, 2000: 598).

There are signs of increasing civic participation in public affairs decision making in Brazil (Avritzer, 2012: 113–127), and there may be specific reasons why transport policies in Curitiba may not be at the forefront of this long-term trend; let us propose a list of the possible reasons: its proven success with proactive instruments (also successful elsewhere), the relative uncertainties regarding the role of the metropolitan institutional level, and, possibly, the fact that a growing segment of public transport users are relatively poor clients at the periphery of the city (Barcellos, 2013; Leitão, 2010), which opens up a series of delicate socio-economic questions.

A final remark is in order on the specifics of Curitiba. Our last point concerns the use of the terms ‘military’, ‘authoritarian’, ‘technocratic’ or ‘top-down’ to describe Curitiba’s institutional mode in achieving its past successes. Nuances are in order here. In achieving their enviable success, the public authorities were not autocratic, capricious or arbitrary. They were indeed technocratic, but this technocratic mode was based on competence and professionalism, where dedicated and efficient public servants worked under a talented mayor, who had a forward-looking plan and implemented it under a certain degree of democratic control, as witnessed by electoral losses and victories over time.

Conclusion

We had thought that, under new urban challenges, and more specifically the challenges of metropolitanisation and increased aspirations for participation, there would be a notable increase of participative, interactive and flexible policy instruments in transport policies in Curitiba. This does not seem to be the case in current transportation policies.

This general conclusion should not, however, be overstated. In this spirit, a few nuances and reservations are in order.

First, as the study presented here is largely based on different categories of policy instruments, it must be pointed out that the classification of a policy instrument under a single category is not always obvious. There are different levels of government for urban transport, working at different scales, and using, sometimes simultaneously, different categories of instruments. For these reasons, there are inherent limits to classifying policy instruments in specific categories.

Second, there may very well be a normative – even cultural – dimension to the distinction between proactive tools, on the one hand, and interactive/governance tools on the other. The interactive tools are often considered as more desirable. But this does not necessarily reflect the practical results of transport policies. There are several examples of cities which have achieved successful urban transport systems, and several among them are reputed to have made ample use of proactive instruments, probably more than most cities in North America for example. Proactive and interventionist tools are certainly one of the roads to success. We are left with the usual recommendations: more research is needed to bring additional light.

Third, even though there are no signs of a substantial move towards interactive–participative models at the present time in Curitiba transport policies, the important public manifestations across Brazil in 2013 may be signs that, as elsewhere, there are public aspirations for increased participation in decision making, aspirations which will eventually work their way into policies and policy instrument choice.