Sao Paulo slows to a crawl as Brazil economy booms

By Todd Benson

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - In Brazil's financial capital of Sao Paulo, the traffic is so bad that vendors line its major highways during rush hour, selling cold beer and snacks to motorists.

Traffic jams around the city can total more than 200 km (124 miles), and on a good day it can take more than two and a half hours to cross town.

The gridlock underscores a broader challenge facing the Latin American giant. As the economy booms, the country's creaky infrastructure is bursting at the seams, forcing public officials to scramble for ways to compensate for decades of poor planning.

"For too long, the prevailing mind-set in this country has been to tackle problems with temporary solutions that bring a short-term fix," said Candido Malta Campos, an urban planner at the University of Sao Paulo.

"If we keep doing that, Sao Paulo is going to grind to a halt in four or five years."

Sao Paulo has nearly 11 million people, 6 million passenger cars, 650,000 motorcycles and 32,000 taxis. And that doesn't include the urban sprawl that holds another 7 million people around the city.

In many ways, it has long seemed like a metropolis on the verge of collapse. In the 1960s and 1970s, millions of Brazilians from the countryside flocked here in search of work in its factories, spawning a population boom that urban planners struggled to keep up with.

Instead of investing in public transportation, successive city governments sought to ease the growing traffic with grandiose but largely ineffective overpasses and tunnels.