Fleet in São Paulo surpasses 10 million vehicles and strains traffic

Organizational change management consultant Mayara Abreu Dias, 35, keeps on her phone a photo of herself and her husband Fernando standing next to a new car they bought in May, still at the dealership. The Fiat had a red bow on the hood and became part of the statistics.

In 2026, the fleet in the city of São Paulo reached 10 million registered vehicles. The emblematic milestone was reached in the month of March. Over 20 years, the number of cars, motorcycles, buses and trucks, among others, more than doubled on the streets of the country's largest city.

In July, the fleet stood at 10.1 million vehicles, compared to 4.3 million in the same month of 2006, according to Senatran (National Traffic Secretariat).

It is as if practically every São Paulo resident had one of these vehicles in their garage — according to IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), the estimated population of the state capital is currently 12 million inhabitants.

Over the past three years, registrations of utility vehicles, a category that includes SUVs, grew consecutively, while automobiles and motorcycles fluctuated, according to Detran-SP (São Paulo State Traffic Department).

"We are seeing that the city no longer has the capacity for so many cars on the streets. There is traffic on any day of the week, including Saturdays and Sundays. There are no off-peak hours anymore," says Viviane Manzione Rubio, a professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at Mackenzie Presbyterian University.

The urban planner bases her assessment on her own observations on the streets and on statistics. São Paulo has been breaking congestion records. At the beginning of the evening on June 24, the slowdown index reached 1,690 km. The figure is the highest since March 2023, when CET (Traffic Engineering Company), in partnership with the Waze app, began calculating traffic across 20,000 km of roads in the capital.

The all-time record was set on September 5, 2019, a Thursday. At 6:30 p.m. that day, there were 1,902 km of slowdowns. However, the measurement methodology was different at the time.

The city has been approaching the levels seen before Covid emptied the streets and avenues due to social distancing. In August, the average congestion was 460 km, the highest since the same month of 2019, when 475 km was recorded, according to a CET survey.

Proportionally, the vehicle-to-inhabitant ratio is far higher in São Paulo than in metropolises such as New York, with 2.2 million vehicles for 8.8 million residents, and Beijing, with 7.8 million vehicles for 21 million inhabitants.

"The key is to create integration within public transport and offer more options to users," says the professor. "There is a lack of alternatives for people living on the outskirts of the city to reach high-capacity systems, such as the subway."

The academic goes against the tide — she sold her car in 2019.

Viviane lives near a subway station in the Ipiranga area, in the southern zone. She therefore gets around mainly by public transport, turning to ride-hailing cars when necessary.

She uses trains, buses and the subway, sometimes all together, and it is not always easy. On the day of the interview with this reporter, she was in a hurry, as she was heading to a graduation ceremony in Jurubatuba (also in the southern zone), about 20 km from home. She took lines 3-green and 5-lilac, and a ride-hailing car from Adolfo Pinheiro station.

It took her 1 hour and 40 minutes to reach the venue — by car, the travel time is estimated at approximately one hour.

Buses and trains have still not recovered the passengers lost since 2020, when social distancing measures were implemented due to the pandemic. The latest edition of the Metro's Origin and Destination survey, from 2025, indicated that for the first time the number of individual transport users exceeded that of public transport users in the greater São Paulo metropolitan area.

In a statement, the São Paulo City Hall lists a series of investments in infrastructure, traffic and transportation measures.

The Ricardo Nunes (MDB) administration notes that the Master Plan guides urban growth toward areas close to public transportation and establishes guidelines to expand cycling infrastructure, improve sidewalks and public spaces, and encourage walking and cycling, reducing the need for heavy automobile use.

It is the convenience — even with the risk of traffic — that led the couple Mayara and Fernando to buy their first car in 2022 and trade it in for a brand-new vehicle last May.

"If we had to take a bus or an Uber to drop our daughter off at school, it wouldn't be a problem, but the practicality of having a car makes a huge difference," says Mayara.

Residents of Lapa (in the western zone), the couple focuses their daily routine within their own neighborhood. "We use the car for short distances. I drive less than ten kilometers a day."

Architect and urban planner Diogo Lemos, executive coordinator of the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety, says that São Paulo reaching 10 million vehicles should be treated as a signal that the city's mobility model needs to be rethought.

In his view, public policies should allow the approximately 12 million residents of the city and the 21 million in the metropolitan region to travel safely and sustainably without increasing — and indeed by reducing — the number of cars and motorcycles.

"The choice for individual transport involves factors such as price, time, predictability, comfort, safety and convenience," he says. "But it is also influenced by public policies and the investments made in the city."

Rafaella Basile, coordinator of Mobility and Safe Roads at the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety, says that improvements made in São Paulo — such as dedicated bus lanes, bike paths and speed reductions — have shown that changes in infrastructure can alter the behavior of the population and make other modes of transport more attractive. The pandemic, however, interrupted part of that process by driving people away from public transportation.

The specialist also advocates for a change in the way streets are organized. Rather than simply separating each mode of transport, she proposes thinking about shared spaces, with lower speeds that allow pedestrians, bicycles and other vehicles to coexist. "The street of the future is a shared street."

In its statement, the city hall says it is adopting measures to improve traffic flow and expand alternatives to individual transportation.

The municipal administration also states that CET has been modernizing the traffic light network with intelligent systems that adjust signal timing according to real-time traffic flow, and that vehicle rotation restrictions remain in place.

"More than 1,700 intersections already have the new technology within the mini ring road," it says.

The city hall also cites structural projects underway, such as the Pirituba-Lapa link, the Grajaú bridge over the Billings reservoir, the Roberto Marinho Road Complex, the Sena Madureira Complex, and the duplication of the Jurubatuba bridge. "The Aricanduva and Radial Leste BRTs and the upgrading of bus corridors are also progressing," the statement reads.