Keeping a city of 20 Million people mobile and out of traffic jams must be a logistic nightmare…. I can hardly imagine the number of buses, depots, trains, cars… Well, I have one figure: there are 7 Million registered cars in São Paulo alone.

However, I have to say the system seems to work, for me. The Metro is super clean, there’s no paper or chewing gum. Respect! Trains come regularly, and I feel safe, even late at night. There’s always people and guards around.

The system is easy to navigate by the color of the line, I got a rechargeable card to swipe and the whole process is very civilized.

During evening rush hour, people queue up nicely at the entry points. In the big stations, they organize the entry and exit with fenced off sections, so that people don’t constantly block each other. In any case, during rush hour, you know, this city is populated!!

In the metro, seats are kept free for older citizens, people with disabilities or pregnant women. And I mean the seat is mostly kept free, even if there are people standing. Anyone who sits down there looks and checks if anyone could need it. I like that attitude.

The network is in development. The Metro has a length of 74 kilometers, with five lines and 64 stations. Compare to Paris: 220 km, 14 (main) lines and 303 stations, for a city of only half the size… My relatively new Time Out guide lacks a number of lines completely… So they keep digging, and it will probably never be enough.

I wanted to go into a certain are of town and asked my landlord if there was a metro. No, he said, this is a rich area. There’s no metro there, they can afford cars.

Interesting perspective. In Paris, any extension of the metro network to your area makes your house and apparent so much more valuable. Here, it seems to be something that’s for the poor(er) areas.

The buses run constantly in all directions. There are – fasten your seat belts – 1349 bus lines operating in the city. When Google maps told me to take bus number 908T-10 or something along those lines I thought some crazy bureaucrat had gone wild on the numbers, but….

And those are some buses. We all know those long buses with the bending section in the middle (the term is ‘articulated’ buses, the all-knowing wikipedia tells me).

Now picture a bus with TWO bends. That’s what I’ve seen in São Paulo. I have no idea how they steer those things.

And then there are the helicopters. You constantly see them flying over the city. It’s not the police. It’s the rich who can afford that special mode of private transportation.