The borders of Brazilian railroads are occupied by 327 invasions of houses and business houses, which have occurred, according to study from the National Association of Railroad Transporters (ANTF), mostly during the time of Rede Ferroviária Federal (RFFSA) – therefore, before the segments were granted to exploration by the private initiative.
In 2008, the Government, through the National Department of Transport Infrastructure (DNIT), created a program to first identify the dimension of safety problems in railroads and, then, reduce the interference between railroads and urban areas. However, the initiative has not had success.
Initially, there is a complex legal issue. “There are nearly 200,000 people living at the borders of the railroad system, and the Union cannot indemnify them because these people are not the owner of the estate. It would be like buying what is already yours. In this case, the area is from the government, and it is impossible to repurchase it,” says an advisor from DNIT. When summoned by Justice to leave the property, the inhabitant always resorts to the Legal system, claiming having made improvements in the site and demanding a reimbursement. On the other hand, the government cannot indemnify them for improvements made irregularly.
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There are segments of the railroad system nearly entirely surrounded by buildings. In these cases, the government prefers to make a detour, passing a new rail outside the agglomeration. Another hypothesis is simply abandoning these lines. Since the 1990s, RFFSA gave up on investing in almost 10,000 km of railroads, for this and other reasons. The state-owned company had 39,000 km of railroads; today, there are only 28,000 km, all granted to private initiative. The abandonment of stretches and the government’s incapacity to remove the population makes it virtually impossible to revitalize the segments.
Buildings near railroads are dangerous for the inhabitants and also bring losses to companies, which need to reduce the speed of their trains from 50 km/h to 15 km/h in these segments.
Illegal occupations can be divided into two categories: the old ones, made before grants, and the new ones, made when the concessionaires were already responsible for the segments.
For ANTF, most of the invasions occurred before the granting process. “The worst invasions are the old ones, there is nothing we can do, and they were made when the government was still responsible for the system. This means that the structure was handed to us with people already living around the tracks,” says Rodrigo Vilaça, executive director of ANTF.
“Currently, as soon as people settle along a railroad, they are discouraged by concessionaires to do so. We always act quickly in order to avoid inhabitants from settling and, then, not wanting to leave,” complements Vilaça.
ANTF gathers 11 of the 12 railroad concessionaires in Brazil, created from the segment’s State-ownership withdrawal in the 1990s. Together, the concessionaires operate 28,476 km. In ANTF’s opinion, the Government is responsible for removing the invaders.
MRS Logística is the concessionaire that controls, operates and monitors the southeast area of the Rede Ferroviária Federal. The most critical area is the arrival to Santos harbor. In the access to the harbor, approximately 20,000 people live at the borders of the railroad. “In addition to lack of safety, we lose with the locomotive speed reduction, which makes the freight cost more expensive,” says Henrique Aché Pillar, Planning and Finance director for MRS.
The government also has difficulties to define who is responsible for making the misappropriations. DNIT is responsible for the lines, but it says that the National Agency of Road Transports (ANTT) was the one that made the grants. ANTT gives to city and state governments the responsibility for managing constructions near rails. Assessors to the governments of the States of Minas Gerais and São Paulo report the responsibilities to the federal government and the concessionaire companies.
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