The Porto Brief, Week of 6 September 2026: Illegal Parking Costs the City 100 Million Euros a Year, One Firm Bids for the Tow-Truck Contract, and Pedro Duarte Turns on the Scooters

Welcome to the Porto Brief, your weekly view from the banks of the Douro. This week the city put a number on its badly parked cars, prepared to spend nearly five million euros towing them away, and heard its mayor say the scooters are next. Your roundup for 30 August to 6 September.

Porto counts the cost of a double-parked car

Tuesday's council meeting is the one to watch. The executive votes on sending the Plano de Mobilidade Urbana Sustentável, the city's ten-year mobility plan, out to public consultation, and Lusa has now read the diagnosis behind it. The headline finding: illegal parking costs Porto at least 100 million euros a year in potential revenue, and the plan calls that conservative. The Municipal Police tow about 15,000 vehicles a year, five per tow truck per day, and roughly 85 kilometres of street, 12 percent of the city's network, is hit often enough to be mapped. Double parking on multi-lane roads is the commonest case, then pavements, crossings, bus lanes and school gates at drop-off.

At the same meeting the executive votes to award the towing contract itself, worth up to 4,983,456 euros. Only one firm bid: PFC Reboques Lda, which would run a 24-hour service every day of the year for up to four years, paid 74 euros per completed tow and 37 euros when one is begun but not finished. Between 2023 and 2025 the city averaged 1,272 completed tows a month. Towed cars go to the Silo Auto or Campo Alegre car parks, and the current contract expires in December.

What the plan would build, and where people get hit

Presented in July at the Rivoli, the PMUS proposes burying three stretches of the Via de Cintura Interna, at Foco, Faria Guimarães and Antas, within ten years, extending the Campo Alegre and Faria Guimarães tunnels, and reprofiling the Estrada da Circunvalação end to end, with an interchange by the Hospital de São João that would sink both the metro line and the road.

The diagnosis also counts the harm. Between 2019 and 2023, collisions with pedestrians killed 13 people in Porto, seriously injured 24 and lightly injured 1,177, clustering in the Baixa, the Boavista, the seafront and the Asprela university pole, and on radial roads such as Fernão de Magalhães and Costa Cabral. About 16 percent happened at a signalised junction, which is to say at a crossing. That is the pedestrian share of the wider toll: 38 people died on Porto's streets over the same five years →

The plan also asked what would move a driver onto a bus. Across 4,739 surveys taken in late 2024, a direct connection to the destination came first at 28 percent, price second at 20, speed third at 19 and frequency fourth at 17. Price weighs heaviest with people living outside the city, which is worth holding beside the free pass more than 100,000 residents have now taken up →

Scooters, seen from the 22

Riding tram 22 between the Carmo and the Batalha on Friday, Pedro Duarte said shared electric scooters "are a problem in the city", that the Código da Estrada already sets requirements enforcement has let slide, and that a concession signed in 2025 by the previous executive limits what the council can do alone. The operators, he said, have shown "enormous openness" to cutting their numbers. He would rather replace them with bicycles.

Around the north

Duarte also gave the metrobus contractor until the end of the year to finish, naming it as the reason the works are late. In Gaia, a court called ten-year-old Champions League ticket buying morally censurable and then acquitted everyone charged over it. Porto's student federation has turned a closed primary school in Póvoa de Varzim into eleven beds with a free metro pass attached. And STCP's buses now answer on WhatsApp, by line, by stop or by your location.

Further out, a court admitted the injunction that could halt Viana do Castelo's new market, the PSP is still hunting the 500 citizen cards taken from the Chaves registry, and the regulator has grounded a Bragança flight school that qualified nobody. The GNR seized 40,000 euros of counterfeit goods from a Vila do Conde shop, and civil protection is rebuilding the timeline of the fire that ran from Torre de Moncorvo into Carrazeda de Ansiães across more than 3,600 hectares, after residents complained about how it was fought.

Upriver, the government approved 12 million euros for growers who cannot sell their grapes, which comes to 50 cents a kilo to leave fruit on the vine. The Casa do Douro called the support not ideal, but what was possible.

At the Dragão

Five games, five wins. FC Porto beat Moreirense 2-1 at home on Friday after a slow start; Bednarek equalised from a William assist and William scored the second after the break. Francesco Farioli has now gone a full year without leaving first place, on 32 wins in 38 league rounds. On deadline day the club sold the Turkish forward Deniz Gül to Galatasaray for 10 million euros plus up to 1 million in variables. The season's first clássico lands at the Dragão on 20 September at 20h30, against Benfica.

What's on

26 Volts, the international performing-arts meeting, runs from 8 to 11 September at the old Freixo power station, with work from Spain, Brazil, Chile, India, Uganda, Morocco and Portugal. Entry is free, tickets from 19h daily. The Feira do Livro do Porto shuts in the Palácio de Cristal gardens today after seventeen days. The câmara's two artistic-direction competitions close on 25 September and 2 October, and the Caminhada das Pontes sets off at 10h on 26 September from the Ponte do Freixo.

That is the week in the Invicta. If there is a story we have missed on your doorstep, just hit reply. The Portugal Brief

Feature image: a delivery van stopped in the Rua de Conde de Vizela, Porto, by julesvernex2 (CC BY-SA 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons.