A vida como ela e' (sem pretender ser Nelson Rodrigues): engarrafamentos sem fim - Cora Ronai

Transcrevo, mas comento antes.
Parafraseando (mal) Nelson Rodrigues, a experiência de se dispor de uma "máquina" pessoal de transporte individual é bonitinha, mas muito ordinária, pelo menos nas condições atuais das grandes aglomerações urbanas brasileiras (mas de outros países também).
A jornalista tem saudade dos tempos em que podia circular "impunemente" pelo Rio de Janeiro, uma vez que sua renda lhe permitia integrar a minoria dos proprietários de carro de algumas décadas atrás.
Ela não se dá conta de que outras pessoas, cada vez com renda menor, já podem ter acesso a essas maravilhosas máquinas rodadoras, já que outra das maravilhas do capitalismo é o de baratear sempre (irremediavelmente, e a despeito da inflação) o preço dos bens manufaturados.
Como outros gostariam de gozar do mesmo direito que ela tinha, quase solitária, a vida virou o que ela é, ou parafraseando Jean-Paul Sartre, "o inferno são os outros"...
Qual solução?
Ela não aponta.
Transportes coletivos, apenas isso.
As pessoas precisariam dispor de metro, de ônibus, bicicletas, etc.
Parece que nossos políticos e planejadores governamentais, urbanistas e outros curiosos na matéria ainda não desceram de seus carros individuais para confrontar esse problema inadiável para todas as nossas cidades (e não apenas as brasileiras). Algumas cidades fazem melhor do que as outras.
Quando eu morei em Shanghai, por exemplo, podia dispor de 13 linhas de metro (agora parece que são 16, e cada vez mais longe...). Em SP e RJ quantas são?
Não sei, acho que nunca peguei, pois não vão a nenhum lugar que eu frequento...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

ENGARRAFAMENTO: "A VIDA FICA MENOR"!
Cora Rónai
O Globo, 17/07/2014

1.  Eu adorava passear de carro! Quando estava sozinha e tinha uma folga no trabalho, saía de casa sem destino definido, e ia aonde o dia me levasse. Explorava ruas que não conhecia, subia ladeiras, rodava por Santa Teresa, pela Muda, pelo Grajaú. Havia sempre uma surpresa interessante pelo caminho, uma casa simpática, uma árvore bonita. O Centro, engarrafado desde sempre, era um dos poucos lugares que não me atraíam: era impossível passear de carro onde o trânsito exigia tanta atenção.
       
2. Na sexta-feira retrasada peguei um táxi em frente de casa, na altura do Corte de Cantagalo, para ir à Fonte da Saudade — uma corrida boba que, normalmente, leva cerca de dez minutos, e custa uns R$ 12 ou R$ 13. Pois levei uma hora e meia e paguei R$ 40. Em vários momentos tive vontade de descer do carro e seguir a pé, mas fazia um calor insuportável, eu estava com uma roupa pouco apropriada para derreter ao sol e, além disso, seria covardia abandonar o motorista sozinho com o prejuízo.
       
3. Na segunda-feira passada tive que ir à Barra. A corrida, se é que se pode chamá-la assim, levou duas horas. O percurso, que antes me dava tanto prazer, há tempos se tornou um suplício; hoje só vou à Barra por absoluta necessidade, e faço o que posso para que essa necessidade seja cada vez menor. Não há comércio, restaurante ou espetáculo que justifique tanto tempo perdido.
       
4. O horrendo trânsito do Rio, que já ultrapassou São Paulo como cidade mais engarrafada do Brasil — e que ostenta o tristíssimo título de terceira cidade mais engarrafada do mundo — acaba com a alegria de qualquer um. Não é só o tempo perdido, o estresse sem fim; ficamos cada vez mais confinados aos nossos bairros, perdemos o prazer de percorrer e de descobrir a nossa cidade. A vida fica menor.

Transportes publicos gratuitos: governo enlouqueceu de vez (ou talvez o IPEA), ou faz demagogia eleitoral

Acabo de ouvir na rádio que um estudo do IPEA, esse órgão que um dia, num passado distante, já foi algo racional, ou pelo menos não tão maluco quanto atualmente, propõe transportes coletivos gratuitos para 7 milhões de pessoas (só isso), para estudantes, idosos, militares, e outros "pobres", sendo que o governo subsidiaria o custo, à razão de 8 bilhões de reais por ano (ao que parece).
Segundo o técnico do Ipea, que explicou a maravilha ao repórter da rádio, o transporte não seria exatamente gratuito, pois teria custo, mas este não seria coberto pelos beneficiários, mas sim pelo "poder público".
Como todo mundo sabe, o "poder público" é aquela entidade mágica que tira dinheiro do ar, ou inventa dinheiro, sem que isso tenha qualquer custo para a sociedade...

Eu já deixei de me surpreender com as demagogias eleitorais desse governo, que está simplesmente destruindo a economia nacional, com esse tipo de medida demagógica e absolutamente irracional no plano econômico.
Poucos dias atrás, o "ministro"  da Aviação Civil anunciou que todo brasileiro passará a poder viajar de avião pelo custo de uma passagem de ônibus, sendo que o governo (mais uma vez, esse monstro metafísico, tão bonzinho) cobriria a diferença, como ele pensa fazer com os transportes coletivos urbanos.
O governo enlouqueceu, ou apenas recrudesce na demagogia barata.
Tudo isso vai custar muito caro, não necessariamente em termos absolutos, mas em desorganização completa da economia nacional e, sobretudo, na psicologia popular. Todo mundo vai passar a acreditar que basta ter "vontade política"  -- como disse o técnico do Ipea, que deve ser um completo idiota -- que se pode fazer.
Pobres brasileiros, pobre Brasil...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Containeres: mais globalizadores do que o livre-comercio

Finance and economics

Free exchange

The humble hero

Containers have been more important for globalisation than freer trade

The Economist, May 18th 2013

THE humble shipping container is a powerful antidote to economic pessimism and fears of slowing innovation. Although only a simple metal box, it has transformed global trade. In fact, new research suggests that the container has been more of a driver of globalisation than all trade agreements in the past 50 years taken together.

Containerisation is a testament to the power of process innovation. In the 1950s the world’s ports still did business much as they had for centuries. When ships moored, hordes of longshoremen unloaded “break bulk” cargo crammed into the hold. They then squeezed outbound cargo in as efficiently as possible in a game of maritime Tetris. The process was expensive and slow; most ships spent much more time tied up than plying the seas. And theft was rampant: a dock worker was said to earn “$20 a day and all the Scotch you could carry home.”

Containerisation changed everything. It was the brainchild of Malcom McLean, an American trucking magnate. He reckoned that big savings could be had by packing goods in uniform containers that could easily be moved between lorry and ship. When he tallied the costs from the inaugural journey of his first prototype container ship in 1956, he found that they came in at just $0.16 per tonne to load—compared with $5.83 per tonne for loose cargo on a standard ship. Containerisation quickly conquered the world: between 1966 and 1983 the share of countries with container ports rose from about 1% to nearly 90%, coinciding with a take-off in global trade (see chart).

The container’s transformative power seems obvious, but it is “impossible to quantify”, in the words of Marc Levinson, author of a history of “the box” (and a former journalist at The Economist). Indeed, containerisation could merely have been a response to tumbling tariffs. It coincided with radical reductions in global trade barriers, the result of European integration and the work of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the predecessor of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

Yet a new paper aims to separate one effect from the other. Zouheir El-Sahli, of Lund University, and Daniel Bernhofen and Richard Kneller, of the University of Nottingham, looked at 157 countries from 1962 to 1990. They created a set of variables which “switch on” when a country or pair of trading partners starts using containers via ship or rail (landlocked economies, such as Austria, often joined the container age by moving containers via rail to ports in neighbouring countries, such as Hamburg in Germany). The researchers then estimated the effect of these variables on trade.

The results are striking. In a set of 22 industrialised countries containerisation explains a 320% rise in bilateral trade over the first five years after adoption and 790% over 20 years. By comparison, a bilateral free-trade agreement raises trade by 45% over 20 years and GATT membership adds 285%.

To tackle the sticky question of what is causing what, the authors check whether their variables can predict trade flows in years before container shipping is actually adopted. (If the fact that a country eventually adopts containers predicts growth in its trade in years before that adoption actually occurred, that would be evidence that the “container” jump in trade was actually down to some other pre-existing trend.) But they do not, the authors say, providing strong evidence that containerisation caused the estimated surge in trade.

What explains the outsize effect of containers? Reduced costs alone cannot. Though containers brought some early savings, shipping rates did not drop very much after their introduction. In a 2007 paper David Hummels, an economist at Purdue University, found that ocean-shipping charges varied little from 1952 to 1970—and then rose with the cost of oil.

Put them in a container

More important than costs are knock-on effects on efficiency. In 1965 dock labour could move only 1.7 tonnes per hour onto a cargo ship; five years later a container crew could load 30 tonnes per hour (see table). This allowed freight lines to use bigger ships and still slash the time spent in port. The journey time from door to door fell by half and became more consistent. The container also upended a rigid labour force. Falling labour demand reduced dockworkers’ bargaining power and cut the number of strikes. And because containers could be packed and sealed at the factory, losses to theft (and insurance rates) plummeted.

Over time all this reshaped global trade. Ports became bigger and their number smaller. More types of goods could be traded economically. Speed and reliability of shipping enabled just-in-time production, which in turn allowed firms to grow leaner and more responsive to markets as even distant suppliers could now provide wares quickly and on schedule. International supply chains also grew more intricate and inclusive. This helped accelerate industrialisation in emerging economies such as China, according to Richard Baldwin, an economist at the Graduate Institute of Geneva. Trade links enabled developing economies simply to join existing supply chains rather than build an entire industry from the ground up. But for those connections, the Chinese miracle might have been much less miraculous.

Not only has the container been more important than past trade negotiations—its lessons ought also to focus minds at future talks. When governments meet at the WTO’s December conference in Bali they should make a special effort in what is called “trade facilitation”—efforts to boost efficiency at customs through regulatory harmonisation and better infrastructure. By some estimates, a 50% improvement in these areas could mean benefits as big as the elimination of all remaining tariffs. This would not be a glamorous outcome, but the big ones seldom are.

^Sources

^{"Estimating the Effects of the Container Revolution on World Trade", by Daniel Bernhofen, Zouheir El-Sahli and Richard Kneller, Lund University, Working Paper 2013:4, February 2013}

^{"Transportation Costs and International Trade in the Second Era of Globalisation", by David Hummels, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(3): 131-154, 2007}

^{"Trade And Industrialisation After Globalisation's 2nd Unbundling: How Building And Joining A Supply Chain Are Different And Why It Matters", by Richard Baldwin, NBER Working Paper 17716, December 2011}

^{Economist.com/blogs/freeexchange}

O governo e sua obsessao pelo trem de alta velocidade

Para um governo que anda, ou se arrasta, em muito baixa velocidade, essa obsessao pelo TAV é realmente incompreensível. No limite chega a ser criminosa, ao comprometer tanto dinheiro público com algo que vai servir a muito poucas pessoas, considerando-se ainda as imensas carências das cidades em metros e outros transportes públicos.
Deve ser alguma mania não explicada... (mania de gastar dinheiro à toa...).
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Governo pode assumir infraestrutura do trem-bala, diz EPL

Presidente da Empresa Brasileira de Planejamento e Logística defendeu o TAV como uma estrutura moderna necessária para comportar a movimentação futura de pessoas

05 de fevereiro de 2013 | 13h 38

Wladimir D'Andrade, da Agência Estado

SÃO PAULO - O projeto do trem-bala poderá ser bancado pelo governo com ou sem a iniciativa privada. A declaração foi feita pelo presidente da Empresa Brasileira de Planejamento e Logística (EPL), Bernardo Figueiredo. Ele explicou que a ideia é que o governo garanta a infraestrutura do empreendimento, que será licitada em um segundo momento, para o operador do trem-bala a ser escolhido no primeiro leilão.
"Não podemos deixar que o operador perceba um risco de não haver interessado na construção da infraestrutura", disse Bernardo, logo após participar de evento na capital paulista. Por isso, afirmou o presidente da EPL, o governo federal vai assumir as obras caso investidores privados não se mostrem interessados na segunda etapa de leilões do Trem de Alta Velocidade (TAV).
O presidente da EPL defendeu o trem-bala como uma estrutura moderna necessária para comportar a movimentação futura de pessoas no eixo Campinas-São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro. Segundo ele, sem o TAV seria necessário construir novas rodovias e aeroportos para atender a demanda dos próximos 20 a 40 anos. "Teríamos que construir mais duas ou três rodovias Dutra, assim como mais dois ou três aeroportos de Congonhas e Santos Dumont para dar conta (da demanda)", disse. "Isso não é sustentável."
Editais
Ele afirmou que os editais dos nove lotes de rodovias que o governo pretende conceder à iniciativa privada devem ser publicados entre o final de abril e o início de maio. Entre esse nove lotes estarão as BRs 040 e 116, que tiveram seus leilões adiados na semana passada.
A previsão inicial do governo é de que o leilão seja realizado 30 dias depois da divulgação. Mas, segundo Figueiredo, os investidores pedem mais tempo. "O mercado pede 60 dias. Nós vamos nos avaliar com eles", disse.
De acordo com ele, editais dos 10 mil quilômetros de ferrovias serão publicados até o final do primeiro semestre. Figueiredo disse que a malha ferroviária a ser construída nos próximos anos prevê, além do transporte de carga, a possibilidade de circulação de trens de média velocidade para o transporte de passageiro.

VEJA TAMBÉM

• Governo amplia prazo de crédito para concessões rodoviárias
• Governo afirma financiará projetos de ferrovias

Transportes e comunicacoes: uma historia global

From: The Globalist (http://www.theglobalist.com/storyid.aspx?storyid=9522)

Globalist Analysis > Global Trade A Brief History of Supply Chains By Sanjeev Sanyal | Thursday, March 22, 2012 Before there were Chinamax cargo ships, cloud computing and satellite communications, there were steamships and the telegraph. Before that were sailing vessels and pack animals. Sanjeev Sanyal, global strategist at Deutsche Bank, traces the technological developments that have changed the way the world moves its imports and exports.

n ancient times, transportation technology was basic and the cost of moving goods was an important determinant of the production and distribution of a product. Thus, goods were put together close to the source of raw materials. Then, these products made their way in a largely linear chain to their end consumer. The first product to be put together with a truly global supply network was rum — with African slaves sending West Indian sugarcane to New England distilleries. Ancient trade routes like the Silk Road through Central Asia and the Spice Route over the Indian Ocean were mostly linear chains that took a finished product to its ultimate destination. Moreover, given the high costs, long-distance trade was limited to high-value items such as spices, weapons and luxury goods. The production and consumption of most items was local. This meant that producer and consumer could directly communicate with each other, and the customer could specify exactly what he or she wanted. This was the world of the village weaver, potter, blacksmith and cobbler. The bulk of pre-industrial artisan manufacturing, therefore, was customized to the needs of the end consumer. It was only in the 18th century that shipping technology improved enough to allow the large-scale functioning of an international production network. Interestingly, the first product to be put together with a truly global supply network was rum. Slave labor was imported from West Africa to the Caribbean in order to grow sugarcane (a plant originally from India). Sugarcane molasses were then shipped to New England where distilleries in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Staten Island turned it into rum. Some of the drink was consumed locally, but much of it was then sold in bottles and barrels in Europe and all over the Atlantic. It is said that the distillation of rum was the single biggest industry in colonial America — although its importance is now all but forgotten except in popular tales about pirates. Shipping to the world As the Industrial Revolution took shape in the late 18th century, production networks took on a totally different scale. The cotton industry was the center of this shift. Prior to the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution, India was the cotton manufacturing center of the world and exported its textiles all over the world. Competition from imported cotton was a major cause of resentment for the traditional wool industry in Britain. Until World War I, communications was the poor cousin of transportation. We have records of heated debates in Parliament in the 1600s and early 1700s about how to restrict the use of cotton. A law passed in 1699 stipulated that "all magistrates, judges, students of the universities, and all professors of the common and civil law… [must] wear gowns made of woolen manufacture." There were even laws that stipulated that corpses had to be buried wearing sheep's wool. By the end of the 18th century, however, technological shifts dramatically changed the cotton industry. The spinning jenny patented by James Hargreaves in 1770 increased the amount of yarn spun by a worker by several orders of magnitude even as the flying shuttle revolutionized the speed of weaving the yarn into cloth. Meanwhile, the American inventor Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin that mechanized the process of separating cotton wool from the seeds. All these changes were complimented by improvements in ship design and, by the mid-19th century, the introduction of steamships. As a result of all these innovations, a global supply network emerged that involved shipping cotton grown in the southern United States (often using slave labor) to the cotton mills in England. The finished cloth was then shipped out to the rest of the world. Over the next century, transportation technology witnessed major breakthroughs that included the railways, trams, bicycles and the Suez Canal. By the time of World War I, we also had the Panama Canal, automobiles and even early airplanes. As a result, the cost of transporting goods dropped sharply. Ocean freight rates, for instance, fell 70% between 1840 and 1910. The improvements in transportation also improved communications — steamships and railways could also carry letters — but there were few independent improvements in communications with the single exception of the telegraph. In other words, communications was the poor cousin of transportation until World War I. As mass manufacturing ramped up, it was no longer possible for individual customers to specify requirements. The supply chain responded by standardizing products. A world with good transportation, but relatively underdeveloped communications, strongly influenced the industrial structure and supply networks of the early 20th century. Production was centralized at major transportation hubs, and Fordist production lines were used to mass manufacture goods. Vertically integrated industrial structures were needed to minimize communication gaps between various segments of the production process. As mass manufacturing was ramped up, it was no longer possible for individual customers to specify requirements. The supply chain responded by standardizing products. Ultimately, even downstream distribution networks succumbed to standardization. This shift is best summarized by Henry Ford's famous comment, "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black." Retailing shifted in favor of large department stores that could house a large selection of standardized products, with price and variety substituting for customization. Postwar technological changes The Second World War witnessed the pinnacle of the Fordist production system. By 1950s, a new generation of technological changes began to alter the structure of global supply networks. As a break from the past, communications began to influence developments independently of transportation. The telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, but it would be well into the 1920s before phones were commonplace in the United States. The first transatlantic call between London and New York took place in 1926, and another two decades would pass before long-distance telephony was common in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, transportation also went through another major innovation — containerization. Most people tend to ignore the importance of this innovation, but it was a radical idea. Until the 1950s, ships had to be manually loaded piece-by-piece. Industrial cables had to be carefully stacked next to boxes of delicate porcelain and perhaps a basket containing fruit. The first transatlantic call took place in 1926. Another two decades would pass before long-distance telephony was common in the rest of the world. This was not just time consuming, it was also very expensive. The cost of port handling accounted for almost half the transportation cost of shipping a truckload of medicine from Chicago to Nancy, France. Moreover, the system was prone to breakage and theft. It was not uncommon that the shipment got lost — and it was very difficult to trace it. In the 1950s, entrepreneurs like Malcolm McLean began to revolutionize shipping — and logistics in general — by introducing standardized containers that could not merely be sealed and loaded into ships, but also could be seamlessly passed on to the truck and rail network. Both ships and ports were redesigned to handle containers. Ships purchased in the early 1970s could carry four times the cargo capacity of traditional ships. Their faster speeds and turnaround time in port allowed them to make six round trips a year between Europe and the Far East, compared to three-and-a-half for the older ships. Interestingly, western countries persisted with building old style ports well into the 1970s. They already had large existing fleets and other infrastructure from the pre-container age and could not easily adopt full containerization. Bureaucratic persistence and political pressure from port workers' unions also slowed the shift. Thus, it was Asia that wholeheartedly adopted containerization and built large new facilities. Hong Kong and Singapore asserted themselves as major ports and clearinghouses for containerized shipping. These two ports had established themselves as the world's largest container ports by 1990 — and Asian ports continue to dominate to this day. Communications revolution The combination of containerization and telephones (and related technologies like the fax) caused the next shift in supply networks. Improved communications meant that it was possible to exactly specify components and products. Containerization meant that these components could be transported cheaply and be delivered "just-in-time." Western countries had large existing fleets and other infrastructure from the pre-container age and could not easily adopt full containerization. In turn, this allowed the production process to be neatly modularized and contracted out. Ironically, one of the first companies to take advantage of this was the U.S.-based toy manufacturer Mattel, which used it to produce the Barbie. Despite Barbie's All-American image, the doll was produced abroad from its very inception in 1959. The earliest Barbie factories were in Japan and Taiwan, and today it is put together by a complex network spanning the world. Although the technologies and practices related to the new supply chains originated in the United States, it was Japan that leveraged them to fundamentally change production systems. Dubbed "lean production," the Japanese production system was both more flexible as well as able to sharply reduce the need to carry inventory. It made the vertically-integrated Fordist assembly line obsolete. Many of the elements of the new system evolved originally in the automobile industry, but they were soon being applied in other sectors too. The electronics industry turned out to be especially well-suited to the decentralized production process. By the late 1980s, the whole world was trying to copy the Japanese system. Nonetheless, it was East Asia that best internalized the network-based production system. There were many reasons for this. First, much of the infrastructure in the region was new. In many cases, the infrastructure was specifically created to support supply chains for Japanese companies. Second, geography helped since most of the key economic hubs could be linked by sea. This was a key advantage since transportation by ship is much cheaper than by rail or road. Third, East Asia had a very heterogeneous mix of skills and wages. This meant that different countries could specialize into different parts of the modular production chain. The addition of Southeast Asia and China's special economic zones to the supply chain meant that the production network could remain within the region even after wages began to rise in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. Asia wholeheartedly adopted containerization and built large new facilities. Hong Kong and Singapore asserted themselves as major ports for containerized shipping. By the 1990s, much of the world's manufacturing had shifted to the new system, but the decade will be remembered for what is best described as the "Communications Revolution." Within a few short years, technologies such as mobile telephony and the internet went from being barely known to being ubiquitous. The efficiency of transportation networks also improved but, in a role reversal, these gains were now driven mostly by improvements in communications technology. The cost of real-time international communications had been prohibitive in the 1930s and barely affordable in the 1960s, but became irrelevant by the end of the 1990s. This not only made lean manufacturing ever more efficient, but allowed the creation of international production networks in a completely new area — services. Around 1993, the management of American Express noticed that the cost of running their credit card operations in India was significantly lower than that for comparable businesses elsewhere. So when the bank decided a year later to consolidate their finance functions in three locations around the world, India was chosen to anchor the Asia-Pacific operations. Very soon companies like British Airways and GE Capital were setting up large outsourcing units in India. Thus was born the global services outsourcing business. Meanwhile, the efficiency gains of "just-in-time" and lean production were making their way downstream and being applied to distribution networks. One of the results of this change was the rise of hyper-markets like Walmart and Carrefour. By leveraging scale, logistics and lean inventories, they were able to bring down retail prices as well as provide consumers with unprecedented choice. Into the cloud The lean production model was the result of innovations in containerization and fixed-line telephony. Although production was decentralized, we are still dealing with a pyramid of rigid industrial relationships (such as the Japanese keiretsu). The communications revolution fundamentally changed this environment by making it possible for everyone to contact everyone, specify a requirement and negotiate a price. This model retained most of the advantages of lean production, but was far more flexible and adaptable. The supply chain was no longer a chain but a cloud — an evolving ecosystem where economic agents could collaborate in one sphere and complete in another. The production of Apple's iPhone and iPad are good examples of this new production network. The iPhone is made up of inputs sourced from around the world that are then assembled together by Foxconn in China. The product never passes through an Apple facility during its production. Yet, Apple receives 66% of the price of an iPhone while Foxconn, the final assembler, receives a paltry 2.5%. Moreover, it is also worth noting that Samsung is a major supplier of the iPhone's components, even though it completes directly with Apple in the mobile phone and tablet markets. Now watch as the distribution end of the chain also dissolves into a cloud. Editor's note: This article was adapted from "Transportation Versus Communications: What is Next?" from the Wide Angle series published by Deutsche Bank.