Recife, Brazil · Public transport lane
In force in Recife right nowTuesday, 13 October 2026 at 06:04 · America/Recife
Lifts Tuesday, 13 October 2026 at 22:00 local time.
This encodes the Faixa Azul and nothing else. Recife also runs BRT corridors under the same article of the federal traffic code, and the authority's own fine register shows them enforced at weekends — every one of the 113 citations issued on Saturday 15 March 2025 fell on Avenida Caxangá, which is not among the twelve Faixa Azul features the CTTU maps. A driver reading "weekdays only" off this schedule and driving a BRT corridor on a Saturday would be wrong, and the error would cost them R$ 243,47.
The permitted crossings are the flexibility here and none of them is encoded. A turn off the avenue, or an entry to reach a property on the right, is allowed inside the window wherever the line is dashed; the rule above will show it as refused.
There is no public-holiday clause, and this is the ninth Brazilian record running without a sourced Brazilian holiday calendar. Here the direction of the error is known: if Recife treats a national holiday as a Saturday the schedule over-warns, which sends a driver into the general lane they were entitled to use — a delay, not a fine.
What is enforced in the street is the paint and the sign, and we cannot read either. The CTTU publishes no register of its road markings, so if the marking in front of you sets a different window on one corridor we would have no way to see it. Where the sign disagrees with this record, the sign is the rule.
The window belongs to the lane, not to the avenue. Outside 06:00–22:00 on weekdays the blue lane is open to general traffic; at every hour, the rest of the carriageway always was.
Operating times only, read from the source below. It does not check your vehicle.
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.
Autarquia de Trânsito e Transporte Urbano do Recife (CTTU), Prefeitura do Recife — "Faixa Azul", the authority's own service page, which states the rule in the present tense, names the corridors, gives the timetable, names the taxi exception and prices the breach
There is no charge. This is a ban on using a lane, not a charging scheme: the CTTU offers no toll, no day pass and no payable permit that would buy a car into the Faixa Azul, and nothing on its service page or in the open-data description prices entry.
The only two ways in are to be the right vehicle — a bus, or a taxi registered in the município of Recife — or to have the right reason, a turn or a frontage property, and neither is sold. Note that Recife does run a paid scheme in the same streets, the Zona Azul parking system at R$ 3,00 a session, and it is a different thing entirely: that buys a place to stand still, not a lane to drive along.
Monday to Friday, 06:00 to 22:00. The CTTU states it in one sentence — "A Faixa Azul funciona de segunda a sexta-feira, das 6h às 22h" — with no seasonal variation, no separate peak window and no public-holiday clause anywhere on the page or in the open-data description that repeats it. Outside those hours, and at any hour on a Saturday or Sunday, the page says nothing restricts the lane.
Autarquia de Trânsito e Transporte Urbano do Recife (CTTU) — "Faixa Azul": the timetable sentence, and the sentence that follows it naming who may still use the lane inside those hours
Six corridors by name, and twelve line features in the publisher's own geometry. The CTTU's service page lists the scheme as running on the avenues Recife, Mascarenhas de Moraes, Herculano Bandeira/Engenheiro Domingos Ferreira and Conselheiro Aguiar, plus the streets Real da Torre and Cosme Viana.
The GeoJSON the same authority publishes as open data draws them as twelve separate lines, every one tagged "Faixa Azul", and splits several corridors by direction: Avenida Domingos Ferreira - Herculano Bandeira; Avenida Marechal Mascarenhas de Moraes in each direction; Rua Cosme Viana; Rua Real da Torre; Avenida Conselheiro Aguiar; Avenida Recife in each direction; Estrada dos Remedios; Avenida Antonio de Goes; and Avenida Governador Agamenon Magalhaes in each direction.
The geometry therefore carries three corridors the prose does not name — Estrada dos Remédios, Avenida Antônio de Góes and Avenida Governador Agamenon Magalhães — and the record treats the wider list as the scheme, because the narrower one would leave a driver unwarned on a lane the authority itself maps as Faixa Azul.
Taken together the lanes lie between 1.35 km and 8.38 km of the city centre, the furthest being the southern end of Avenida Conselheiro Aguiar in Boa Viagem. One name a driver may meet is deliberately NOT in this area: Avenida Caxangá.
The CTTU lists it among the corridors it enforces electronically, but it is absent from the Faixa Azul geometry, and it is a BRT corridor rather than a blue lane — which matters, because it is the one that gets fined at weekends.
Autarquia de Trânsito e Transporte Urbano do Recife (CTTU) — "Faixas e Corredores de ônibus", the authority's open-data entry on the municipal portal dados.recife.pe.gov.br, which carries the corridor list in prose and the twelve line features as a GeoJSON under the Open Database License
The authority's own map: Autarquia de Trânsito e Transporte Urbano do Recife (CTTU), Prefeitura do Recife
There is no emission standard to meet. The Faixa Azul sorts vehicles by what they are for, not by what comes out of the exhaust: a bus may use the lane, a Recife-registered taxi may use the lane, and every other vehicle may not, whatever its Euro class, its PROCONVE phase or its registration year. A new electric car has exactly as little right to the lane as a twenty-year-old diesel.
No emission threshold appears on the CTTU's page or in the open-data description.
Not applicable, for the same reason as the petrol standard: fuel is never mentioned. Nor is weight, length or number plate — which is what separates this scheme from every other Brazilian entry in this corpus. São Paulo's ZMRC and the lorry bans in Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Porto Alegre and Salvador all turn on a measurement of the vehicle; Recife's turns on which strip of asphalt you are driving on.
Autarquia de Trânsito e Transporte Urbano do Recife (CTTU) — "Faixa Azul", which joins the rule to its price itself: "De acordo com o artigo 184 do Código de Trânsito Brasileiro (CTB), a multa para os condutores que desrespeitarem a sinalização é gravíssima, no valor de R$ 243,47 e 7 pontos na Carteira Nacional de Habilitação (CNH)". The seven licence points are half of the fourteen that suspend a Brazilian licence, and the corpus does not carry them as a number, so they are said here and in how_to_comply instead. This is the D-053 exception rather than our arithmetic: we never pick an infraction class out of the national fine table, and the amount stands only because the publisher printed the article, the class and the sum in one sentence, as CET did in São Paulo and Transalvador did in Salvador
Autarquia de Trânsito e Transporte Urbano do Recife (CTTU) — "Faixa Azul" for the rule, the exceptions, the dashed-line signal, the two-camera notification rule and the fine; and the CTTU's own "Registro das Infrações de Transito" open dataset for the weekend citations on Avenida Caxangá and the Praça do Derby figure
Autarquia de Trânsito e Transporte Urbano do Recife (CTTU), Prefeitura do Recife — "Faixa Azul", the authority's service page and the primary statement of the rule: the present-tense description, the corridor list, the Monday-to-Friday 06:00–22:00 window, the bus and Recife-taxi exception, the dashed-line signal, the linked-camera notification rule and the R$ 243,47 / seven-point penalty under article 184 CTB (the endpoint we monitor for all of it)
Autarquia de Trânsito e Transporte Urbano do Recife (CTTU) — "Faixas e Corredores de ônibus" on the municipal open-data portal, updated 2 March 2026. A second, independently maintained publisher channel on a different host and a different content system, carrying the same rule and the same timetable, and shipping the lanes themselves as GeoJSON under the Open Database License. Where a scheme has no instrument to read, two channels still stating it is the evidence that it is current (the D-081 test) — and here the two disagree on their own arithmetic, which is how we know they are maintained separately rather than mirrored: the service page says "cerca de 60,18 km de corredores exclusivos ... sendo 45,48 km de Faixa Azul" while this one says "cerca de 62 km ... sendo 40 km de Faixa Azul". The contradiction is the publisher's, is recorded as V-012, and touches no fact this record encodes: the rule, the hours, the exceptions and the fine are identical in both
Autarquia de Trânsito e Transporte Urbano do Recife (CTTU) — the Faixa Azul geometry itself, "faixas-e-corredores-de-onibus.geojson", twelve LineString features every one tagged Tipo "Faixa Azul", internally named FaixaAzul18Jun2020. This is the source for the three corridors the prose does not name and for the extent measurement behind the city anchor: every coordinate lies between 1.35 km and 8.38 km of the anchor, so the record needs no radius. Not held as a boundary, because the contract stores areas and this is a set of lines (see boundary_coverage). The stable download URL redirects to a pre-signed object-storage link that expires in an hour, so the monitor is expected to report this source as redirected on every run; that is the publisher's delivery mechanism and not a change in the data
Autarquia de Trânsito e Transporte Urbano do Recife (CTTU) — "Registro das Infrações de Transito", the authority's own register of every fine it issues, published as open data under the Open Database License with a file per year from 2006. This is the evidence that the rule binds drivers now rather than only that it was announced once: the 2025 file holds 171,109 citations, a control term returns 0 against it, and 18,442 of them carry infraction code 7587 — "Transitar na faixa ou via exclusiva regulam. p/ transp. públ. coletivo passag.", legal basis "Art. 184, Inc. III" — with the enforcing agent recorded as "Código 9 - FAIXA AZUL". The same file is the source for the weekend finding: on Saturday 15 March 2025 all 113 citations under that code fell on Avenida Caxangá, a BRT corridor outside the Faixa Azul geometry. The dataset page is watched rather than the CSV, which is tens of megabytes and would be the D-077 mistake in a different file format
Next scheduled re-check: 2026-12-12.