Another year-end (2025 to 2026) arrives, and those who take the bus in Campinas wake up to a reality that should already be familiar: another increase in public transport fares. The fare, which cost R$ 5.70, now rises to R$ 6.00, while the transport voucher reaches R$ 6.50. For those who depend on the bus every day to work, study, or access basic services, this adjustment is not a technical detail, but a direct impact on the monthly budget. (Want to know more about public transport in Campinas/SP? Click here for the full text).
The official justifications are also nothing new. They talk about the economic balance of the system, increased operational costs, and the need to maintain contracts. However, this abstract explanation has little to do with the concrete experience of those at the bus stops and terminals. The daily reality continues to be marked by frequent delays, overcrowded vehicles, long intervals, and a service that does not match the price charged.
The fare increase occurs within a profoundly unequal model. Public transportation in Campinas is concentrated in the hands of a few companies, which control practically all the city’s lines. It’s an oligopoly sustained by public concessions, where there is no real competition or possibility of choice for the user. Those who depend on the bus pay more, regardless of the quality delivered.
This model helps explain why fare increases seem automatic, while improvements are slow or imperceptible. The concentration of the system reduces pressure for innovation, efficiency, and respect for the user. With each increase, the feeling is reinforced that the fare serves more to guarantee contracts and operating margins than to improve urban mobility.
Even public subsidies—paid with money from the entire population—do not, in practice, translate into a better service. The recurring promise of fleet renewal, modernization, and efficiency does not change the daily lives of those who spend hours commuting. The result is expensive, exclusionary, and increasingly unattractive transportation, which pushes part of the population towards individual transportation and exacerbates urban problems.
For those who use public transportation, the message conveyed by the new fare increase is clear: you pay more to stay in the same place. As long as the system continues to be organized to benefit a few operators, mobility will continue to be treated as a commodity, not a right.
Campinas doesn’t need successive fare increases without real benefits. It needs to break with the logic of oligopoly, expand popular control, guarantee transparency in costs, and reposition public transportation as a public service geared towards those who truly sustain the system: those who are on the bus every day.
In the struggle, we are dignified and free people!
