“What best defines public transport today is exhaustion.” This is the opening quote of the documentary short film Tarifa Zero: cidade em disputa (Fare-Free Public Transport: An Urban Battle), summing up not only what millions of Brazilians experience in their everyday lives, but also the brutal logic that structures Brazilian cities. It is a system that depletes the time, energy, income, and health of those who have to rely on public transport to work, study, access leisure, or simply live.
Katarine Flor is communications coordinator at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s São Paulo Office.
The film was co-produced by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in partnership with Brasil de Fato and presents a thoughtful and rigorously analytical picture of the lives of people who spend up to five hours commuting every day. They endure overcrowded routes, wait for buses that never come, spend a third of their wages on transport tickets, and face insecurity, overload, and the erasure of their dignity. But the short film not only denounces this situation — it also points to concrete alternatives.
Fare-Free Public Transport as a Political Proposition
The documentary’s narrative is centred around fare-free public transport (FFPT) as a key proposition to promote a broad change — not only in the current mobility model, but in the relationship between city and citizenship. As the direct cost of commuting is eliminated, access to services, opportunities, and the right to move around is expanded. More than a technical measure, this is a political decision: to consider collective well-being before private interests. Whose interest is it to keep turnstiles closed?
The film includes interviews with Lúcio Gregori, former head of the São Paulo City Transport Department during the Luiza Erundina administration, known for conceiving the Fare-Free Public Transport project; Gisele Brito, coordinator of the Climate and City area of the Peregum Black Reference Institute; Jô Pereira, president of the Brazilian Cyclists’ Union; Daniel Santini, a coordinator at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation who holds a master’s degree from and is pursuing a doctoral degree at the School of Architecture and Urban Studies of the University of São Paulo; and Elisangela Paim, coordinator of the Latin American Climate and Energy Programme at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. There are also interviews with public transport users and experts who help to understand how the current urban mobility structure reinforces profound inequalities.
Mobility, Health, and Social Justice
The documentary also discusses the profound impact of fares on the many dimensions of urban life. Access to work, school, and leisure becomes more viable when transport costs don’t deplete a significant part of people’s wages — which is currently a reality for many Black women, single mothers, young people, and workers who live on the urban periphery. Commuting issues also have a direct effect on people’s mental and physical health, as they face long workdays and have no time for rest, personal care, or social life.
Tarifa Zero: Cidade em Disputa is an invitation to imagine and build, with courage and conscience, cities that are truly ours.
Poor transport leads to widespread consequences: compromised nutrition, sleep deprivation, lack of time for self-care, social isolation, and psychological distress are side effects that overwhelm users. Expensive public transport fares also have an impact on access to healthcare: people miss their medical appointments, postpone tests, stop going to therapy because they cannot afford transport fares. FFPT, in this context, emerges as a redistributive policy to expand access not only to the city, but to life with dignity.
Racism and Urban Segregation
The film sheds light on the role of transport in maintaining a racially and socially segregated city model. It is Black and poor people living on the outskirts who face the longest commutes, the worst travel conditions, and the highest relative transport costs. The logic behind the distribution of modes of transportation — bike lanes, subway lines, shared bikes and scooters — reveals urban planning from the perspective of whiteness and the economic elite, primarily aimed at central areas of the city.
By treating public transport as an instrument of social domination, the piece denounces the turnstiles as a symbol of structural urban racism. Territorial segregation is a structural pillar of inequality, which prevents a large part of the population from accessing the city’s common goods.
The Electric Vehicle Fallacy and the Environmental Crisis
On an environmental level, the film very fundamentally counters the dominant logic of “green modernization” based on the electrification of personal vehicles. It provides criticism of the replacement of combustion engine vehicles with electric vehicles, showing that this transition, when detached from a change in the current mobility model, only displaces the socio-environmental impacts to other territories. Battery manufacturing, based on intensive lithium mining, generates new sacrifice zones — often in communities in the Global South.
The documentary also denounces internal green colonialism: the use of an environmental rhetoric to justify technical solutions focused on private transport without tackling the structural causes of urban exclusion. The transition from personal to collective modes of transport is presented as the only real alternative for sustainability, social justice, and public health. Fare-free public transport, in this sense, is not just a mobility management measure — it is a civilizational project.
Tarifa Zero: Cidade em Disputa is an invitation to imagine and build, with courage and conscience, cities that are truly ours.
Translated by Aline Scátola.
The film is currently being shown across Brazil, check the schedule of screenings here.