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By David Mangurian From the air, Rio de Janeiro's new Yellow Line expressway dominates the city, a six-lane macadam serpent connecting the southwest end of this traffic-choked, sprawling metropolis with its northern zone and international airport.As Rio's biggest public works undertaking since the city's water system was expanded 30 years ago, the Yellow Line is a project of superlatives. Its two parallel 2.2-km-long tunnels, carved through solid granite hills, are listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest urban tunnels in the world. The 19-turnstile toll plazas are as big as the parking lot of many suburban shopping malls. The 21-km trip across Latin America's fourth-largest city takes 45 minutes less on the Yellow line than it did before the expressway was built. Many Cariocas, as local residents are known, are now saving 10 hours of commuting time a week, and they are very happy about it. Several weeks after the expressway opened in October of 1997 O Globo newspaper conducted a survey in which 90 percent of all Yellow Line users pronounced it either "very good" or "excellent." The newspaper also reported that sidewalk vendors in the northern barrios near the Yellow Line were starting to peddle suntan lotion because people there could now get to Rio's popular southern beaches so easily. "The Yellow Line has changed the geography of Rio," says Bruno Dauster, president of LAMSA, the company that operates the toll expressway. "Because of the mountains, there had been very little contact between the northern and southern zones of the city." After the road's first full year of operations, traffic volume has grown to an average of 68,000 vehicles a day during the first quarter of 1999 --13,000 more than expected. In the process, the Yellow Line has siphoned off an estimated 30-45 percent of traffic from alternate roads in its vicinity, decreasing congestion throughout a city renowned for terrible traffic jams. "The Yellow Line has finally relieved Rio's traffic," crowed one newspaper headline. The Yellow Line had been in Rio's master plan for three decades, but the difficulty of coming up with the $320 million needed for construction kept the project on perpetual hold. Finally, in 1994, the city broke ground on the project. But it soon became clear that the city did not have the resources to complete it. Not to be discouraged, municipal officials requested proposals from construction firms able to help finance the remaining 15 km. In return, the city offered a concession to operate this section as a toll road. Construtora OAS Ltda., a large construction company from the state of Bahia, beat out four other firms that submitted bids by offering to finance 51.5 percent of the cost in return for a 13.5-year concession to operate and maintain the expressway. Construtora OAS had $57 million of its own to invest in the project. But finding private long-term financing at attractive rates for the remaining $36 million turned out to be a problem. In early 1996, the IDB agreed to lend OAS $14 million. It was one of the first loans the Bank made directly to the private sector after its Board of Governors authorized such operations in 1994 as a way to encourage private sector participation in public sector infrastructure in Latin America and the Caribbean. This financing helped Construtora OAS leverage two $11 million six-year loans, one from a private international bank and the other from bndes, Brazil's national development Bank. "Once the IDB agrees to finance a project," says Hazel Pordoy, the IDB specialist who helped to negotiate the loan to Construtora OAS, "the commercial banks will come in under the Bank's umbrella." "The IDB loan gave credibility to the entire project," says LAMSA's Dauster. "It was very important." According to Luis Rubio, senior advisor in the IDB's Private Sector Department, the Bank was more than just a financial catalyst. It was also instrumental in modifying the project so that the 3,800 families displaced by the new expressway were given new housing instead of just indemnification. It also insisted on measures to better handle rainwater runoff, reduce noise, and allow public buses to use the Yellow Line. The Yellow Line finally opened to traffic in Oct. 1997, but tolls were not collected until Jan. 1, 1998, so that LAMSA employees could be trained. The toll system includes a state-of-the-art wireless collection system that reads radio signals emitted by special tags attached to cars. Frequent users of the expressway who wish to use the system open an electronic toll-paying account. They can then drive right through a designated toll lane equipped with a tag reading device that automatically debits their account. This time-saving service is now used by some 11,000 commuters. Recently, Construtora oas, LAMSA's parent company, negotiated an extension of the toll concession to 25 years in return for investing $40 million more to add two lanes to the four-lane 5.6-km-section built by the city, thus giving the entire 21-km-long Yellow Line the same capacity. At present, six-lane traffic feeding in the four-lane section is causing huge traffic jams for motorists of up to 40 minutes, according to Fernando Cohen, an IDB private sector loan specialist who is now preparing terms for a second IDB loan to finance up to $10 million of the extension's cost. The expansion will also include an interchange to connect the Yellow Line with Rio's older Red Line expressway that runs from near downtown Rio to the city's international airport. The expansion, already under construction, is expected to be completed by mid-2000. Dauster says expressway traffic is expected to increase another 9,000 vehicles a day to 77,000 vehicles. |
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