Cristiano Machado Avenue: under construction for 60 years.

Minas 247 - It's becoming increasingly difficult to find a resident of Belo Horizonte who has seen Cristiano Machado Avenue clean, without the dirt and equipment that characterize a construction site. Since the early 50s, the avenue that provides access to the northern and northwestern regions of the capital has undergone some type of intervention. Local residents even nicknamed it the "eternal construction avenue." Along with the heavy traffic, this has led to enormous traffic jams – another characteristic of Cristiano Machado. 

Read below a good report by Danilo Emerich e Raquel Ramos, from the newspaper Nowadays ( click here (to read it on the newspaper's own website) 

Cristiano Machado Avenue has been under construction for over 60 years.

 Do you remember a time when Cristiano Machado Avenue wasn't under construction at some point? Probably not. Built between 1951 and 1972, it's one of Belo Horizonte's main thoroughfares, with over 80 vehicles circulating daily. For the past 60 years, however, it has been constantly broken up, opened up, and modified. The result is always the same: traffic jams that test the nerves of any driver. The interventions are so numerous that some residents in the surrounding area have nicknamed the avenue "the eternal construction site."

Cristiano Machado Avenue, named in honor of the 16th mayor of the capital, was planned to connect the city center to the cargo terminal of the slaughterhouse, where the São Gabriel neighborhood (Northeast region) is currently located. The route was unpaved, with a large tree-lined central median and kilometers without any buildings around it. A path that shouldn't have been easy to traverse, as is still the case today.

In the 1970s, Cristiano Machado Avenue had barely been inaugurated when the first intervention was already underway, with the construction of the Lagoinha-Concórdia Tunnel. At the same time, it was being expanded to the Ring Road. In that decade and the next, the avenue became increasingly busy, following the growth of Belo Horizonte, which was gaining new neighborhoods such as União, Palmares, and Fernão Dias.

Since the 1940s, 88-year-old retiree Adelino Cândido Silva has observed the changes on Cristiano Machado Avenue. The resident of the Sagrada Família neighborhood (East) remembers when it was nothing more than a road surrounded by weeds. “I was expropriated for one of the expansions. The avenue is always under construction, it has grown along with the city. The interventions disrupt traffic, but then they ease up a bit,” he says.

The first signs of saturation on the corridor appeared just eight years after its inauguration. At the time, the solution was to widen the lanes and create central bus corridors.

Undertaken under the guise of improving traffic, the expansions always caused congestion during the works and, even after completion, many had their effectiveness questioned. Photographer José das Dores Araújo, 63, who has been crossing Cristiano Machado Avenue for 30 years, complains about the frequent interventions. "Construction and lots of cars create a bottleneck. I joke that they only replace the asphalt, because nothing solves the problem," he says.

Other investments were wasted, as happened with the trolleybus or electric bus project. The poles were installed, but the system never became operational. Even some of the money allocated to recent projects, such as the Green Line, went down the drain. Lanes had to be destroyed due to the BRT (Bus Rapid Transit).

Traffic consultant José Aparecido Ribeiro criticizes the amount of construction work and says that it has never solved traffic problems. “It’s a road that needs to have flow, without interruptions. There’s a lack of long-term planning. They don’t consider that the number of vehicles will continue to grow.”