SP156: São Paulo's unified municipal service request channel
In December 2016 the Prefeitura de São Paulo replaced its old SAC system — a menu of 1,265 items — with one channel for municipal service requests: the 156 phone line, a web portal, an app, chat and chatbot, plus in-person counters at subprefeitura service halls and Descomplica SP units. A 2018 decree obliges every municipal body to publish a Carta de Serviços stating the deadline for each service, and each request returns a protocol number the filer can track. Beyond that the deadline binds nothing: no automatic escalation, no penalty and no published on-time compliance rate could be found. What the city does publish is the record-level data — every request since 2012, refreshed quarterly, under a CC0 dedication.
5,577 of 15,752 tree-pruning requests filed through 156 between July and September 2023 were still open on 3 November 2023 — 35.4% — with an average 23 days to evaluation; figure computed by Metrópoles from the city's own SP156 open data, not disclosed by the administration.
🎓 Lesson
Bangkok's Traffy Fondue publishes a closure rate; São Paulo publishes the tickets. Releasing every request at record level under CC0 costs the city the ability to choose which number describes its own performance — the 35% pruning backlog was counted by reporters, and the administration was left answering for it.
Evidence📰 Media
Scale🏙️ City-wide
FundingMunicipal budget (Prefeitura de São Paulo)
Sources
↗ Prefeitura de São Paulo — launch of the SP156 portal and appDates the unified digital channel to 8 December 2016 and states it replaced the SAC system, 'o menu do antigo Sistema de Atendimento ao Cidadão (SAC), com 1.265 itens'; gives ~300 services online and an app carrying the 50 most-requested (≈80% of demand). Fetched successfully. Its claim that the May 2016 call-centre contract was 31.37% cheaper (≈R$33m/yr) is operator self-reporting and is not used in this entry.
↗ SMIT — SP156 frequently asked questionsEstablishes the channel set (phone central, portal, site chat, app, chatbot, subprefeitura service halls, Descomplica SP) and that some services accept anonymous requests ('dependendo do serviço solicitado, o cidadão pode abrir uma solicitação anônima'). Fetched successfully. Establishes the null result too: it says nothing about what happens when a service deadline lapses, about reopening, or about escalation.
↗ Política Municipal de Atendimento ao Cidadão — Central SP156Official policy site confirming SP156 is run by the municipal innovation secretariat, that the 156 call is free, and that it covers 'praticamente todos os serviços oferecidos pelos órgãos e entidades municipais'. Fetched successfully. Its unsourced description of SP156 as 'uma das maiores redes municipais de atendimento ao cidadão do mundo' is deliberately not used.
↗ Orientação Técnica da Carta de Serviços (Decreto 58.426/2018)Establishes that Decreto Municipal 58.426 of September 2018 created the citizen-service policy and that its Carta de Serviços must publish each service's channels, deadlines (prazos), norms, documentation and whether anonymous filing is allowed; Art. 31 requires each body to publish its Quadro Geral de Serviços Públicos. Honest flag: this PDF was not fetched directly — the decree number and the deadline-publication duty are corroborated across several Prefeitura pages, but no reviewer here has read the decree text itself.
↗ Portal de Dados Abertos — Dados do SP156, SolicitaçõesFetched successfully. Establishes record-level publication of requests from 1 January 2012 to 31 March 2026 (extract dated 2 April 2026), 200+ CSV/XLSX files plus channel-evaluation files 2019–2025, quarterly updates, publisher SMIT, personal data stripped — and the licence: 'Creative Commons CCZero', carrying the Open Definition seal. Also carries the caveat that reclassifications and inter-departmental transfers limit comparability across periods.
↗ Metrópoles — 'Mais de 35% dos pedidos de poda de árvore estão em aberto em SP'Established Brazilian press, 7 November 2023. Fetched successfully. Source of the impact figure: 5,577 of 15,752 requests from July–September 2023 still open on 3 November 2023 (35.4%), 23 days average to evaluation, computed by the journalists from the municipal open data. Also carries the city's reply, which attributes 3,600+ pending prunings to utility Enel not de-energising lines.
↗ Portal da Transparência — Dados Abertos SP156The city's own framing page for the SP156 dataset, including its caution that request counts do not necessarily correspond to the number of real problems in the city. FETCH FAILED: the host returned a Prodam-SP CAPTCHA challenge instead of the page, so its contents are known only through the search index. A monthly request-volume figure appearing on it is therefore not asserted anywhere in this entry.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “SP156: São Paulo's unified municipal service request channel” — São Paulo, Brazil. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/sao-paulo-sp156/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
