Infrastructure with method: the base that supports Ponta Grossa's growth

Ponta Grossa was born as a junction: a place of passage, landing, of routes that crossed and decided where the region was going to grow. Centuries later, the city continues to be defined by its paths — only now we are the ones who design them, rather than simply following them. This is the logic that guides the work of the Secretariat of Infrastructure in recent years: to take care of the base before the city covers it. We reformulated the road network, modernized the public transport, reordered the urban growth from structuring axes, expanded the air connectivity of the city and started to treat the valley funds that cut our neighborhoods as environmental heritage, not as backyard. They are distinct fronts, led by different teams and contracts, but driven by a single purpose: a larger, better, more humane city only rests on a planned infrastructure, technically responsible and designed to last—never improvised.

Asphalt with science.

In 2021, when we took over the portfolio, we did something that the city had never done in a systematic way: we mapped street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, the real size of the problem. The result was a road network of about 2,000 kilometers, of which about 500 kilometers —a quarter of the city— still without a single layer of pavement. From this diagnosis was born the Asphalt 100% program, structured on a tripod that became our way of working: universalization of access, so that no neighborhood is left out; solid technical projects, that resist time and supervision; and diversified sources of resources, so as not to depend on a single line of financing. Today we add FINISA resources, agreements with the State Government, BRDE and IDB financing, Itaipu counterpart, own resources and federal agreements — a mosaic of more than R$ 600 million mobilized between works delivered, in execution, in tender and in the project phase. The coverage of the city is already close to 90%, and the goal is objective: to complete 100% of the projects by the end of 2026 and deliver 100% of the works by 2028.

But asphalting is not just spreading mass over the earth. We went on to technically control every layer of the pavement before it disappeared under the asphalt. We set up our own technological control lab, which conducts soil, aggregate and asphalt mass tests before, during and after the execution of each work — checking compaction, particle size, binder content, all that decides whether a street will last five years or twenty. We make asphalt with science: every kilometer paved carries, behind the surface that you see, a technical dossier that guarantees durability and prevents the city from paying twice for the same work. It is engineering in the most literal sense of the word, applied to something as everyday as the street in front of each house.

More modern and more transparent public transport.

Since 2021, we have been working to modernize, from end to end, the municipal public transport system. We implemented approximation ticketing, which allows debit and credit card payment directly in the vehicle — a simple change in the passenger routine, but which required reshaping the entire technological architecture of the system behind it. The result came in the form of national recognition: Ponta Grossa won 1st place among the cities of up to 400,000 inhabitants in the EMV Transportation Award, in the category "Payment by Approach", within the ranking "Majors & Best of Transportation 2025" - a seal that the modernization we have done here is among the most advanced in the country.

We also opened the system's black box. We launched the Transparency Portal of public transport, making available to the public operational data on a service that, historically, has been one of the most questioned — and least understood — topics in the city. In it, any citizen can monitor how the system works from the inside. In this same line of clarity, we formally separate the technical tariff, which represents the actual cost of operating the system, from the public tariff, which is the amount effectively paid by the user. This distinction, now explicit, is a change in governance: it makes clear to the population what is the true cost of keeping the buses running and what is the public investment that sustains social policies such as the passe livre student, today one of the greatest guarantees of mobility for young people in the city.

A city that organizes itself to grow.

Infrastructure is not just about fixing what already exists — it is about deciding, in advance, where the city is going. That is why we treat urban growth as something to be conducted, not just absorbed after it has already happened in a disorderly way. On the one hand, we continue to consolidate the structuring axes already foreseen in the Plano Diretor (axis to be confirmed), continuing a planning that crosses managements because it makes technical sense. On the other hand, we open entirely new axes, which prepare neighborhoods for a growth that is yet to happen: Edilson Araújo Street, in Cara-Cará and Parque dos Pinheiros, and the Anita Garibaldi Link, which sews the Orphans and Boa Vista neighborhoods, once separated by an urban void. In both cases, the logic is the same—to open the way before the occupation is spontaneously and disorderly consolidated. It is the inverse of the pattern that marked much of the recent history of the city, in which the neighborhood arrived first and the infrastructure, decades later, tried to reach it.

Airport: preparing the next jump.

We also move forward on a front that changes the scale of the city's connections: the airport of Ponta Grossa. The construction of the new Passenger Terminal (TPS), the aircraft yard and the taxiway is underway, an investment of more than R$ 30 million that will enable the airport to category 3C — a leap that expands the size of the aircraft and the volume of operations that the city will be able to receive. In parallel, we included the airport in the federal government’s Expand Program, which provides for the concession of regional airports to private initiative. It is a movement that projects Ponta Grossa to a new level of air connectivity, consistent with the logistical intersection role that the city has always played.

Infrastructure that takes care of the environment.

There is also a less visible, but equally strategic front: the care of the valley floors that cross the neighborhoods of Ponta Grossa, historically precariously occupied and treated as the backyard of the city. In partnership with the Free University of Meio Ambiente, we developed the Strategic Project of Socio-Environmental Recovery and Reurbanization of Valley Funds, a technical-scientific research work in the watersheds of the Olarias, Pilão de Pedra and Ronda streams. From this effort were born macrodrainage projects and the so-called Urban Acupuncture – one-off interventions, such as squares, landmarks and walkways, that give back to the population spaces of conviviality next to areas that, for a long time, the city preferred to forget. It is infrastructure in the broadest sense of the term: not only draining water or paving streets, but recovering, for the people, parts of the city that the city itself had left aside.

Vision of the future.

With the goal of universalizing access to road infrastructure approaching the horizon – 100% asphalt – it is natural for the city to start looking at the following challenge: the connections between neighborhoods and the duplication of the major structuring axes, already defined in the Urban Mobility Plan. It is the continuation of the same reasoning: after every street has pavement, the question becomes how these streets connect to each other and how the large corridors of the city absorb a volume of traffic that only grows.

They are several fronts of the same engineering — paving with technique, modernizing transport with transparency, ordering growth with planned axes, expanding air connectivity and taking care of the environment that crosses our neighborhoods — but all are born of the same commitment: to treat infrastructure not as an isolated work, but as the silent backbone that sustains everything that the city wants to be. It was by routes and paths that Ponta Grossa was formed. It is by routes and paths, now planned with method, science and vision of the future, that it continues to become bigger, better and more human.

 

Article by the secretary Luiz Henrique Honesko for the book "PG 203 years: From the route of the tropeiros to the tracks of innovation"

https://youtu.be/s067ZW7EJdw