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Curitiba, a mid-sized Brazilian city, is frequently cited in urban planning literature not for the scale of its transit investment but for the sequencing of its decisions. In the early 1970s, city planners rejected a proposed underground metro system, judging it too costly for the municipal budget, and instead redesigned surface bus corridors so that dedicated lanes ran along the city's main growth axes. Tube-shaped boarding stations were installed at ground level, allowing passengers to pay fares and board before the bus arrived, which cut dwell times at each stop to roughly the same duration as a subway train's. Zoning rules were rewritten simultaneously: buildings along the transit corridors were permitted greater height and density than those elsewhere, so that residential and commercial growth clustered naturally around the bus routes rather than spreading outward. Land use and transport planning were treated as a single decision rather than two separate departments issuing separate rules. Over the following three decades, the system expanded to carry more than two million passenger trips daily despite the city's modest size, at a fraction of the per-kilometer cost of comparable rail projects in Europe and North America. Critics have noted that the model depends on unusually strong coordination between planning agencies, a condition not easily replicated where transit and zoning authority are split across competing municipal bodies. Ridership growth has also begun to strain corridor capacity in recent years, prompting proposals for supplementary elevated lines. Nonetheless, more than two hundred cities across Latin America, Asia, and Africa have since adopted variants of the surface bus-corridor approach, citing its low upfront capital requirements as the decisive factor over its theoretical capacity limits.