Variations in the demand for buses in the City of São Paulo

Temporal analysis from 2014 to 2023

Abstract

Accelerated economic growth and urban sprawl at the beginning of the twentieth century significantly transformed the urban landscape, moving residential areas away from urban centers and productive zones, giving rise to the need for urban public transport systems. In 2020, the situation of Urban Public Transport (TPU) became complicated due to the Covid-19 Pandemic, which changed the dynamics of urban displacement, causing significant drops in passenger demand. Thus, this study makes a quantitative analysis of the demand in TPU for buses in São Paulo, based on data on passengers transported/day between January 2014 and December 2023. The objective of the study was to analyse the variations in daily, monthly, and annual demand to verify the behaviour of the data and the post-pandemic situation. The results show that demand suffered normal oscillations between 2014 and 2017 and started to have a downward trend from the second half of 2018, this drop was substantially intensified at the beginning of the Pandemic, from March to May 2020, outlining recovery from June 2020 to July 2021 and enters apparent stability in 2022 and 2023. In the annual daily average, demand falls from 9.5 million in 2014, to 8.6 million in 2019, 6.5 million in 2022 and to 6.6 million in 2023. These last data indicate that demand seems to have defined a new level of travel in the city of São Paulo, which can have a strong impact on mobility and urban accessibility in the city of São Paulo.