White elephant, black hole

Last month a re­port made by the Foun­da­tion for the Study of Ap­plied Eco­nom­ics (FEDEA, in its Span­ish acronym) re­vealed that Spain's high-speed rail sys­tem (pa­tri­ot­i­cally called the Alta Ve­loci­dad Española: AVE) is by far the largest white ele­phant west of the Urals. Since 1992, gov­ern­ments of both the right and left have spent 50,000 mil­lion euros of pub­lic money on line after line, each ra­di­at­ing out of the Span­ish cap­i­tal, so that now Spain (pop. 46.5 mil­lion) has more kilo­me­tres of high-speed rail than any other coun­try ex­cept China (pop. 1,400 mil­lion). And this year, de­spite the eco­nomic cri­sis, Madrid will be adding an­other thou­sand kilo­me­tres, at a cost of 4,000 mil­lion euros. This, de­spite the fact that Spain's trans­port needs were al­ready being met by mo­tor­ways, ex­press trains and around 50 air­ports, be­fore the AVE net­work was welded onto the coun­try, ap­par­ently with­out any thought as to whether it was re­ally nec­es­sary or not. The FEDEA re­port demon­strates that there are nowhere near enough trav­ellers to jus­tify the run­ning costs of (let alone the ini­tial in­vest­ment in) the AVE. Each year, more peo­ple (25 mil­lion) travel on the French TGV be­tween Lyon and Paris than on the en­tire Span­ish high-speed sys­tem put to­gether. Even the most suc­cess­ful line - Madrid-Barcelona - will take over a hun­dred years to pay for it­self, and many other lines re­quire huge an­nual sub­si­dies just to keep run­ning. (One line, con­nect­ing Cuenca, Toledo and Al­bacete, was shut down when it was cal­cu­lated that it cost 18.000 euros a day to run, which would have made it cheaper to drive each of its daily av­er­age of 9 pas­sen­gers to their des­ti­na­tions in pri­vate lim­ou­sines). The one line that would be eco­nom­i­cally vi­able - con­vey­ing both peo­ple and goods along the Mediter­ranean coast from An­dalu­sia through to Cat­alo­nia and be­yond - doesn't exist; and (if we have to judge from Madrid's in­sis­tence on being smack in the cen­tre of all its high-speed tracks) prob­a­bly never will. As for the AVE net­work that is al­ready in place, the FEDEA re­port states sim­ply: “None of it should ever have been built”. But it has been, and it's using and los­ing lash­ings of pub­lic funds and will go on doing so till king­dom come. Or until one par­tic­u­lar king­dom goes.