The projects of BRTs (articulated buses in exclusive lanes), which are being implemented in the city of Rio de Janeiro, and the expansion of the Subway line, may become an important incentive for 'cariocas' (people who live in Rio de Janeiro) to replace their cars.  That is what the engineer and former director of Metrô Rio, Fernando Mc Dowell, stated in an interview for the magazine Conjuntura Econômica.Mc Dowell said that the city's population demonstrates greater willingness to spontaneously stop using cars on weekdays. Today this percentage is 40%, not very different from the past decades. If we consider that São Paulo had to adopt a rotation system to encourage a non-use level of 20%, we can see that cariocas already have a much more developed public transportation culture, he says.Mc Dowell is for the reduction of cars to reduce the level of traffic jams in the cities. The percentage of traffic increase tends to be greater than the natural increase of the fleet, he says, indicating that, while from 2003 to 2011 Rio de Janeiro recorded a fleet expansion of 34.8%, according to data from Detran-RJ, the traffic increase in the same period reached 50.6%.Click here to learn more about this month's edition of Conjuntura Econômica (in Portuguese).And learn about the English version, Brazilian Economy.