What Brazil Has And Hasn’t Achieved On Road Safety

Ana Luiza Carboni is an outlier in Brasília: though she could have a car, she chooses not to. Nor do her two sons drive.

Not everyone has the privilege to make this choice, given the Brazilian capital’s high cost of living and poor public transport. Carboni, a cycling advocate, has to deal with the disbelief and judgment of other people in a place where a car is a status symbol. “I’m looked at as if I’m less of a person,” she says.

She’s seen other changes in Brazil’s car culture over the years. The building where she lived for most of her life, in Niterói, once had parking spaces big enough for a Volkswagen Beetle, but the parking markings were redrawn as cars started ballooning in size. Now there are fewer spaces for larger cars, which are more lethal to pedestrians.

Clearly, shifting Brazil’s car culture is a daunting task. But some bright spots indicate that this work is both urgent and feasible — with useful lessons for other places.

Progress compared to other middle-income countries

1.3 million. This is an often-cited but hard-to-imagine number, representing the number of people killed in road traffic each year.

Most of these people are outside of cars at the time, including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists, wheelchair users, and other non-drivers often grouped together under the umbrella term “vulnerable road users” (VRUs). However, car-safety design has historically prioritized car drivers and passengers rather than VRUs. In Brazil, as in many other places, these VRUs tend to have lower incomes than drivers.

Like many countries, Brazil has set the goal of halving road traffic deaths this decade — which could ultimately mean 120,000 lives saved between 2018 and 2030. This goal is in line with the international one set by the UN decades of action for road safety (2011–2020 and then, following the underwhelming performance in the first period, 2021–2030).

This is an incredibly ambitious target for most countries, but particularly for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) like Brazil, which tend to have not only fewer financial resources, but also fewer regulatory institutions to drive change.

The disparity is stark. One estimate is that 93% of people killed in road crashes live in LMICs, even though these countries have just 60% of the world’s cars.

“Countries in North America and Western Europe have been much more successful at reducing road traffic deaths,” explains Kavi Bhalla, who researches public health at the University of Chicago. His and colleagues’ research has found that this isn’t just about higher incomes.

More significantly, from the late 1960s onward, OECD countries started to get more serious about evidence-based approaches to road safety, rightly viewing these as the responsibility of the government and all of society, rather than individuals. In large part because of regulations set by national road safety agencies, changes to road and car design — including seatbelts and deformable roadside barriers — have “resulted in traffic deaths declining steadily in the US and Europe for five decades,” Bhalla notes.

However, fatality rates are still much higher than they should be. In the US, pedestrian deaths are actually on the upswing.

Compared to the regulatory muscle and design changes that have led to fewer deaths overall, Bhalla pulls no punches when discussing awareness, education, and media campaigns — think of flyers advising drivers to lower their speeds, or pedestrians to be careful where they walk. “These approaches never work,” he states. It’s hard to get drivers to change their behavior, and it’s both insulting and short-sighted to blame vulnerable road users for their vulnerability, which has been largely caused by inadequate road design and policy.

However, according to Bhalla, “unfortunately, most low- and middle-income countries continue to rely primarily on behavioral interventions, which numerous evaluations have shown are unsuccessful at changing behaviors or reducing crashes.”

As Bhalla and colleagues have found, Brazil has been a remarkable outlier among low- and middle-income countries. There has been a dramatic fall in road deaths in the last few decades, even though the numbers of cars and people have increased.

Brazil’s official data recorded a 29% drop in road traffic deaths between 2012 and 2019. Bhalla and coauthors argue that this data underestimates such fatalities, and that the true figure is 25%. Even so, a 25% reduction in this cause of death is a major achievement. It’s only halfway to the UN target, but halfway is much greater progress than in other LMICs.

How did Brazil do it? Effective steps have been stronger enforcement of drunk-driving laws and redesign of roads to improve safety. However, improvements have been very uneven around the country, and the overall level of deaths remains high.

Progress compared to other Brazilian cities

Among Brazilian cities, Fortaleza is sometimes held up as a road safety showcase. The city dramatically increased infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians, which contributed to a 40% plunge in road crash deaths between 2014 and 2018.

Dante Rosado, the senior manager for road safety programs at Vital Strategies, a public health nonprofit, explains that Fortaleza was chosen to participate in the Bloomberg Philanthropies Initiative for Global Road Safety due in part to its high number of road deaths. Vital Strategies’ road-safety work in Fortaleza and elsewhere has spanned data, enforcement, communication, and urban design.

The latter, Rosado believes, “is the most important pillar in the in the in our work, because the evidence shows that when we change our streets, we can have a huge impact on traffic fatalities.” There’s one particular aspect they’re addressing here: speeding. “The speed is the most important risk factor for traffic deaths and injuries,” Rosado emphasizes. Indeed, transport experts point out that speed is generally the difference between life and death if a crash does occur.

To address this, Rosado says, “we work with cities to develop a speed-management culture.” This includes reducing speed limits, yes, but “just to change the speed limit is not enough to make the people lower their speed.” A more holistic speed-management culture could include inexpensive-yet- effective measures like narrowing lanes and installing speed bumps so that people drive more slowly.

And in Brazil it would have to address motorcyclists, who are often young, low-income men living in areas where public transport is slow and expensive. In cities, they are more likely than other groups to be killed or injured by drivers.

Rosado recommends that speeds in cities not exceed 50 km/h (approx. 31 mph) in cities, or 30 km/h (approx. 19 mph) in areas with pedestrians. However, this runs counter to national guidelines. Brazil’s Traffic Code recommends high speeds on urban roads, of up to 80 km (approx. 50 miles) per hour. (A bill is currently before Brazil’s Congress that would adjust speed limits according to the road’s use, among other things.)

Cities can set their own limits higher or lower than the Traffic Code, but “it’s difficult for the politicians to take the decision to change this,” says Rosado. Speed limits remain high in many areas thronged with pedestrians and people with mobility issues, such as 70 km/h (approx. 43 mph) along Rio de Janeiro’s beachfront.

The reason for this is not logistics, but politics. For instance, São Paulo reduced speeds and increased camera enforcement in 2015, which according to one study averted collisions by 21.7% in the first 18 months. However, despite the clear improvement in safety, in 2017 this program was reversed by a new mayor, who had campaigned on the issue.

Throughout Brazil, “the speeding culture is very present” and ingrained over many decades, Rosado says. “Even the people that don’t have cars, they think that the right thing is to have a car. And if you have a car you have to go fast, because this is what the propaganda presents to them.”

This is tied to perceptions of freedom, but also to the idea that people are more secure in cars that are going faster, given the possibility of carjacking and assault. Rosada calls this a myth, saying, “It’s not because you’re reducing your speed that you’ll be assaulted.”

In Fortaleza, advocates developed a strategy to convince the mayor to reduce the speed limit for entire roads. In general, speeds were lowered from 60 km/h to 50 km/h for the most dangerous roads. The city adopted enforcement and engineering measures in tandem, leading to a 65% reduction in the number of traffic deaths, according to Rosado. Fortaleza has since graduated from the Bloomberg initiative, “and now they are moving by themselves,” Rosado says.

There are limits to what cities can do, even with international philanthropic support. They don’t have the power to change state and national highways, where many traffic crashes occur. But they can collect information and engage in advocacy.

As for communication, which Bhalla notes is less impactful than policy changes, Rosado believes that this can have a role in building the political acceptability of those policy changes. “With communication, we can put the road safety problem in the agenda of the city. In general, the population doesn’t understand the problem. They don’t know how many people die, they don’t know the impact on the health system, and in addition they don’t know that this problem is preventable.”

Carboni agrees: “It needs to be publicized how the measures can save lives and protect people. This to me is the most important part, because then there is no negative political cost.” She believes that Fortaleza communicated this well.

Thus, even if mass-communication campaigns don’t necessarily change driver behavior, they might just change voter behavior. A persistent problem around the world is that a privileged car-driving minority (alongside industry interests) can be very politically vocal, while low-income people are predominantly vulnerable road users.

Much more work needs to be done

While some Brazilian cities are starting to develop road safety plans, this has been very slow, Carboni says. The statistics are worrying.

Unfortunately, the trend of fewer road deaths reversed in 2020. Brazil is off-track to achieve the 50% reduction goal of the Second Decade of Action for Traffic Safety and its own National Plan for the Reduction of Traffic Deaths and Injuries (Pnatrans), Rosado reports. He also acknowledges that financial crisis in the first decade was one reason for the decline in road deaths, as people drove less.

Another big shock impacting traffic violence has been the Covid-19 pandemic. Serious collisions involving cyclists increased by 11% between 2020 and 2021, as more people cycled and drivers actually increased their speeds, according to Carboni.

A paradox is that while drivers recognize that Brazilian roads are dangerous, they don’t necessarily connect that to high speeds. Instead, as in many other parts of the world, drivers complain about attempts to enforce speed limits, viewing these as a revenue-collection exercise rather than an effort to save lives.

Carboni believes that this presents an opportunity for improved communication with drivers so that sensible policy changes can be made with less grumbling. “We need to lower speeds, to have traffic-calming measures. And that would be positive for everyone, including motorists.” She points out that speed reduction can actually reduce congestion overall.

For example, according to Carboni, there are fewer traffic jams along the Rio–Niterói Bridge at 80 km/hour (50 mph) compared to 110 km/hour (68 mph). “You go 80, but a constant 80.” Another of the advantages for drivers, apart from a less stressful journey, is fuel savings from a constant speed.

In Fortaleza, Rosado also heard worries about lower speeds leading to longer travel times. He counters, “But you have numbers that show that when you reduced the speed from 60 to 50, for instance in Fortaleza, the travel time was reduced just 6 seconds per kilometer. So it’s almost nothing.”

Communicators can of course also bring home to drivers the real human impacts of these measures. In a study by the Instituto Multiplicidade Mobilidade and União de Ciclistas do Brasil, 82% of drivers surveyed reported knowing someone who had died in traffic.

In Brasília, where national motorways wind through the city, Carboni is calling for these to become city roads. Another campaign is to redesign a 60 km/hour road around the biggest bus terminal in Brasília, where crashes are frequent.

Carboni remains optimistic. While many people resisted seatbelt laws when they were introduced, now this is an utterly normal rule. “The most important message is that it is possible to change in a positive way,” Carboni emphasizes.

Similarly, concludes Rosado, “We believe that it’s possible to convince the politicians and the society to do the right thing.” This would involve more politicians from different sectors talking to each other. While the health sector has helped to drive attention to the impacts of transport policy, he says the environment sector’s role has not had enough of a voice in these discussions.

To save more lives on the roads, enforcement of speed limits would need to be stepped up. “We have good legislation that never gets enforced, and that’s what we don’t want to see,” Carboni comments.

Also needed is more funding for road safety, including to the national road safety strategy, which is not fully funded. However, Rosado believes, “The budget is there. What you have to do is allocate where you are putting the money to the right things, the efficient things. Usually urban planning focuses on cars, not people. When you change this perspective…it’s not so expensive to promote road safety.”

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