An alternative to air transport – whose fares rose 23.5% on average in the country last year – road transport also registered a rise in prices in 2022. Although, on the Brazilian average, the increase in the price of bus fares is more modest than than that of the plane, the advance was more than double the inflation.
While road tickets for interstate trips rose 13.8%, the Extended National Consumer Price Index (IPCA) rose 5.79%.
In some cities, the increase in road transport was even heavier than that of air transport. This is the case of Belém, Fortaleza, Salvador and São Luís. The biggest difference was registered in the capital of Pará, where the average road ticket rose 30.9%, and the air ticket, 3%.
The main factor that explains the increase in road transport is the price of diesel, which represented about 30% of the sector’s costs. Last year, the liter rose 22.87% in the country, according to the IBGE.
Expresso Itamarati – which operates in São Paulo, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, Rondônia, Goiás and Minas Gerais – supplies itself at 40 points in the country and saw an average increase of 53% in diesel last year.
In early 2022, the company paid BRL 4.01 per liter of fuel; in December, it was R$6.12. With this increase, the weight of diesel in the cost of companies increased from 31% to 38%.
Cost
“On the company’s long lines, diesel has already surpassed the workforce and has become the main cost”, says Gentil Zanovello Afonso, director-superintendent of Itamarati.
According to him, the increase in diesel prices occurred because, with difficulty in accessing natural gas due to the war in Ukraine, Europe started to use diesel to activate its thermoelectric plants, increasing the demand for the fuel.
As Brazil imports 30% of the diesel it consumes, the impact was direct.
With operations in São Paulo, Espírito Santo, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Alagoas, Sergipe and Pernambuco, Viação Águia Branca saw the weight of fuel increase from 25% of its costs to 40%.
The readjustment that reached the consumer, however, ranged from 10% to 15%, according to the company’s commercial director, Thiago Chieppe Juffo.
“It is impossible to make a full transfer to the consumer. We are in a challenging moment in the economy, and there are other travel alternatives that the consumer evaluates. If you make a total transfer, you lose the customer”, says the executive.
Faced with this scenario, Águia Branca has reduced its operating costs by 26% since the beginning of the pandemic, in order to be able to close accounts.
Real devaluation raises bus prices
In addition to the high fuel prices, the devaluation of the real has also pressured ticket prices.
A large part of the parts used in the manufacture of the chassis and bodies come from China and are priced in dollars, which increased the value of the buses, according to the board member of the Brazilian Association of Land Passenger Transport Companies (Abrati) Letícia Pineschi.
“I was even surprised by the increase in ticket prices. My expectation was that the readjustment would be higher, around 24%, due to the pressure of costs”, he says.
According to Itamarati’s director-superintendent, Gentil Zanovello Afonso, the chassis of a simple vehicle, for example, went from R$ 480,000 to R$ 600,000, an increase of 25%. Long-line buses rose from R$ 1 million to around R$ 1.3 million.
At Itamarati, the readjustment that reached the passenger last year also varied between 10% and 15%.
The increase in ticket prices has already led consumers to give up traveling.
The day laborer Maria de Lourdes Conceição Neto, 47 years old, stopped spending Christmas with her brother in the interior of Minas Gerais. A resident of São Paulo, she had seen, in August, that the ticket would cost R$107. She left it to buy it at the last minute and the price had risen to R$500.
“I was going with my sister, my nephew and my brother-in-law. But no one was able to travel.”
Letícia says she does not believe in the possibility of prices continuing to advance this year.
The information is from the newspaper The State of S. Paulo.
Source: CNN Brasil
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