Brazil: 1 scheme to know about before you drive in.
Recife has one driving restriction on our books: the Faixa Azul (public transport lane). What is a public transport lane?
Sources last read on 2026-09-13, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2026-12-12.
Recife is the first city in this corpus whose restriction is a lane rather than an area, and the distinction is the whole of the record: the avenues stay open to everybody, but the blue lane painted along the left of six named corridors belongs to public transport from Monday to Friday between 06:00 and 22:00, and driving along it costs R$ 243,47 and seven licence points.
The CTTU, the municipal traffic authority, states the rule in the present tense on its own service page: buses have the lane, taxis registered in the município of Recife also have it, and everyone else may enter only to make a turn or to reach a property on the right — with the paint itself telling a driver when that is allowed, because the line goes from solid to dashed where entry is permitted.
The corridors it names are the avenues Recife, Mascarenhas de Moraes, Herculano Bandeira/Engenheiro Domingos Ferreira and Conselheiro Aguiar, plus the streets Real da Torre and Cosme Viana.
Enforcement is by patrol and by camera, and the camera rule is unusually forgiving in a way worth knowing: on the lanes with frontage properties a driver is notified only after being caught by two or more cameras, precisely so that a legitimate turn is not fined. What makes this record firm without an instrument behind it is that the publisher runs the scheme in public data as well as in prose.
The CTTU ships the lanes themselves as a GeoJSON of twelve line features under the Open Database License, and it publishes every fine it issues: in its 2025 register, 18,442 of 171,109 citations carry infraction code 7587, "Transitar na faixa ou via exclusiva regulam. p/ transp. públ. coletivo passag.", under article 184, section III of the federal traffic code, with the enforcing agent recorded as "Código 9 - FAIXA AZUL".
This is not a rule we found written down and hoped was current. It is one we watched bind eighteen thousand drivers in the publisher's own ledger.