Brazilian Highway System

The Brazilian Highway System (Portuguese: Sistema Nacional de Rodovias) is the highway system of Brazil. As of 2010^[update], the system consists of almost 2 million kilometers of roads, of which approximately 200,000 km are paved.

As it is in the United States, Canada or most countries in Europe, larger/wider highways have higher speed limits than normal urban roads (typically between 80 km/h and 120 km/h), although minor highways, unpaved highways and sections of major highways running inside urban areas have a lower speed limit in general. The national speed limit for cars driving in non-urban roads is 110 km/h unless otherwise stated, regardless of the road design, weather or daylight.

Brazilian Regional highways are named YY-XXX, where YY is the abbreviation of the state where the highway is running in and XXX is a number (e.g. SP-280; where SP means that the highway is under São Paulo state administration).

Brazilian National highways are named BR-XXX. National highways connect multiple states altogether, are of major importance to the national economy and/or connect Brazil to another country. The meaning of the numbers are:

Often Brazilian highways receive names (famous people, etc.), but continue to have a YY/BR-XXX name (example: Rodovia Castelo Branco is also SP-280).

See highway system of São Paulo for numbering designation for São Paulo state roads, also used in some other states.

In 1953, Adhemar de Barros, then governor of São Paulo, finished Via Anchieta, linking Santos to São Paulo, and Via Anhanguera, linking São Paulo to Campinas, two highways using the most modern standards of that time. It would be the major accomplishment on the area for years.

When Juscelino Kubitschek assumed the presidency, he created subsidies to bring multinationals like Volkswagen to Brazil and created thousand of miles of roads, linking distant regions of the country. Most of these roads follow poor standards, but they created links where there were none. The military presidents would mostly follow these same standards to expand the system. The exceptions would be the modern highways built by the São Paulo State Government.

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