Sao Paulo state considers building new highway to Port of Santos

The Brazilian state of São Paulo is considering building a new highway to the Port of Santos. The new road would be built through the Serra do Mar State Park, a protected area and Brazil’s largest continuous stretch of Atlantic Forest. It would begin at the Rodoanel Leste (Ringroad East), near the city of Suzano, and end in the Guarapá neighborhood in the continental area of Santos, near the junction of the Cônego Domênico Rangoni Highway with the Rio-Santos Highway, which leads to the northern coast of São Paulo.

Another option for increasing the capacity of truck traffic for containers to the Port of Santos is to build a new lane on the Anchieta and Imigrantes highways, which the company Ecovias manages.

The idea of a new highway between the plateau and the Baixada Santista is not new. It emerged in the 1980s with former governor Paulo Maluf and was put on the back burner. It resurfaced in 2020, during the administration of Governor João Doria, who launched an invitation for proposals to build a multimodal corridor to the port, called the ‘Green Line.’

It is precisely this corridor that enthusiasts of the new road now want to see implemented by Governor Tarcísio de Freitas. The mayors in the region, such as Rodrigo Ashiuchi and Rogério Santos, helped to make a chorus in defense of the project, which can also benefit tourism in the Baixada Santista. The work is estimated at around R$ 12 billion and is being evaluated by the State Secretariat for Public-Private Partnerships. However, there is still no concrete schedule for its implementation.

“It’s not just about connecting point A to point B. What’s at stake is what this connection will produce for the future. It’s a project for yesterday, as the process can take ten years between licensing and completion of the work,” says José Wagner Leite Ferreira, coordinator of the Inland Navigation and Ports Division of the Institute of Engineering, which brings together experts from various sectors to discuss the new corridor in a workshop on the 19th.

Ferreira says that the environmental impact on the Serra do Mar can be mitigated with new construction technologies, which allow for creating the fewest possible access points through the forest area. He cites as an example the double-lane expansion of the Tamoios Highway, which gives access to the northern coast of São Paulo, which obtained environmental licensing and was able to mitigate the impacts in the protected areas around it.

“Today’s technologies allow for maximum construction efficiency. The damage that can happen is minimal, acceptable, and there are protocols to be followed to care for the fauna and flora,” he says.

With about 47 kilometers, the route passes near the Vila de Paranapiacaba, the former center of operations of the English company São Paulo Railway, which took coffee to the port by the Santos-Jundiaí railway. The railway was inaugurated in 1867 and has been listed by the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (Iphan) since 2008.

The new project also includes transporting goods on rails, but Ferreira says this is not a railway whose concession depends on the federal government. It is a linear system on rails, called a carousel, and allows the wagons to hold up energy on the way down and use it on the return when climbing up the mountain range. The system would be installed in the central or lateral bed of the road, which could have about 70% of its route formed by tunnels and viaducts. One of the alternatives is to do, in these stretches, a “two-story” construction – one for vehicles and the other for tracks.

Ferreira says that despite the English company having overcome the mountain range Serra do Mar 150 years ago, today it is unfeasible to think of a railway in the section, which is short and too rugged for the volume of cargo headed for the port. The wagons are now much heavier, and the investment, he says, would be unfeasible. The Serra do Mar is steep, with an estimated drop of 800 meters between the plateau and the Baixada Santista, and the use of a train would require low-gradient ramps, increasing the “snail effect” in the design of the route.

The justification for the new highway is the growth of the Port of Santos, which is breaking records with about 160 million tonnes of cargo per year. Today, about 50 million tonnes arrive by road. The forecast is that the port will reach 240 million tonnes by the end of this decade, of which 140 million will have to go by road, causing an access bottleneck. The rest, mainly grains, is transported by rail.

Today, the only way down to the port for container trucks is the Via Anchieta. Inaugurated in 1947, the road has become the largest export corridor in Latin America. Due to steep sections, its younger relative, which is also part of the same transport system, Imigrantes, is unsafe for heavy trucks. On the way up the Serra do Mar, heavy and light vehicles can use both highways under the guidance of Ecovias.

See below the movement of containerized cargo at the Port of Santos between Jan 2019 and May 2023, according to the DataLiner maritime intelligence tool.

Cargo movement at Port of Santos | Jan 2019 – May 2023 | TEU

Source: DataLiner (click here to request a demo)

The Anchieta-Imigrantes System, which also includes two coastal highways (Padre Manoel da Nóbrega and Cônego Domênico Rangoni), serves, in addition to the Port of Santos, the demand for tourism to the Baixada Santista and part of the North coast, the Cubatão Petrochemical Pole and the industries of ABCD Paulista. In the first quarter of this year, the volume of light vehicle traffic grew by 6.4% compared to the same period in 2022. That of trucks, 0.7%.

The project’s supporters argue that a new road can be built in the Anchieta and Imigrantes system, but the solution would be more of the same since the roads leading to the two highways also have traffic problems. Even with the ring road ready (only the North section is missing), numerous trucks block one of the main streets in the South Zone of the city of São Paulo, Avenida dos Bandeirantes, the main route for tourists from the capital and the interior of the state towards the beaches.

That is why the idea of the new highway is not limited to the route but to the development it can provide to other regions of the city of São Paulo and municipalities of the Alto Tietê.

The architect Alcindo Dell’Agnese, specializing in logistics and urban planning projects, states that the new highway will generate development in the East Zone of the capital, one of the most unemployed, and in the surrounding municipalities.

The proposal is to create a 500,000-square-meter covered logistics platform in Suzano, on the edge of the Rodoanel Leste, in a complex that includes a hotel, training center, and retail network. The space and the neighboring municipalities would also start attracting manufacturing industries due to the easy access to the Port of Santos to import and export parts and components.

“The logistics platform can generate 30,000 to 50,000 jobs in the region,” projects the architect.

A second logistics platform would be installed in the Guarapá neighborhood, the arrival point of the new highway in Santos. A 2012 decree by the Mayor of Santos delimited the scope of a technological park in the municipality, which never materialized. In 2011, a complementary law included the Guarapá neighborhood in this area, which is located in the continental part of the municipality.

A curiosity that few people know is that the territory of Santos is not just the coastal strip after the Serra do Mar. Its continental area is vast: the municipality climbs the mountain and borders Santo André, in the ABC Paulista, and Mogi das Cruzes, in the Alto Tietê region, both neighbors of Suzano. That is, Santos will also be able to compete for projects in this region.

Dell’Agnese explains that the new São Paulo highway benefits, in addition to the São Paulo economy, the companies installed in the South of Minas, in cities such as Pouso Alegre, Itajubá, Extrema, where a large logistics platform already operates, and Varginha, an important coffee exporter.

“It is a State project. It does not benefit only São Paulo, but part of Minas Gerais and the entire area of ​​the Port of Santos coverage, which reaches Mato Grosso,” says the architect.

Source: Globo Rural

To read the original news report, go to: https://oglobo.globo.com/brasil/sao-paulo/noticia/2023/07/19/governo-de-sp-estuda-nova-rodovia-entre-a-capital-e-o-porto-de-santos.ghtml

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