City Hall postpones planning on Rua Uruguaiana and authorizes 75 street vendors to operate there

The city hall postponed work on Rua Uruguaiana and authorized 75 street vendors to operate there. The measure will be valid from April 8th, when the planning operation carried out by the Municipal Guard begins. Another 45 street vendors may be authorized and relocated to other regions of the city, according to the Public Order Secretariat (Seop).

The order was initially scheduled for this Monday. Seop reported that in the last two weeks, in parallel to the urban intervention work, led by the Subprefecture of the Center, to implement some improvements in the region, the organization’s Urban Control Coordination carried out a mapping in the area and identified that there were 120 street vendors in good condition. to be regularized.

The street vendors who will remain on Uruguaiana Street will be able to operate along the road, in the stretch between Buenos Aires and Carioca Streets. The 75 street vendors were chosen by electronic draw, held this Tuesday among the 120 eligible to be regularized.

The 45 who remained will be able to regularize themselves in other parts of the city. The city hall did not say which ones. They will also be forwarded to the Secretariat of Labor and Income, which also has a team dedicated to the topic of refugee protection, Seop said.

The announcement that street vendors could no longer occupy Rua Uruguaiana was made by Mayor Eduardo Paes, on his social media, at the end of February. At the time, he posted that the decision had been taken together with Governor Cláudio Castro. In the publication on the X network, formerly Twitter, the mayor highlighted the street as one of the points of sale for stolen goods, such as cell phones.

The day after Paes’ post, the municipal secretary of Public Order (Seop) Brenno Carnevale announced that he would plan an operation to remove illegal street commerce from that location. The secretary even said at the time that the points on the street were being occupied by what he called “asphalt militias”.

At the beginning of March, the city council began an intervention on the road, which included works to widen sidewalks, install paving and modify signage in order to facilitate the changes that will be made to traffic. The changes are expected to allow the creation of a new flow of vehicles in the Center, with a section of Rua da Assembleia, close to Largo da Carioca, starting to operate in two ways.

The deputy mayor of the Center, Alberto Szafran, said that with these interventions, the city hall is reinserting Uruguaiana on the map of the city center.

—Cariocas can expect a redeveloped Uruguaiana from an urban point of view and much more attractive for pedestrian and vehicle traffic. The regulation of street vendors will allow people who work there honestly to be able to support themselves there, collecting taxes and in a much more organized way — he said.