The first data provided by the Mexican government on the use of the Maya Train, the mega-project of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to connect the tourist sites of the Yucatán Peninsula, show a number of travelers below official expectations and that it was used mostly for short trips.
The 1,500-kilometre network, with sections still under construction, has been heavily criticised for its major environmental impact, its profitability – it has required an investment of more than 30 billion dollars – and because its construction, as well as that of the stations and surrounding hotels, is the responsibility of the Army, something that many sectors consider problematic due to the lack of accountability mechanisms with which the military can operate.
According to the director general of the project, General Oscar David Lozano, there are 17 trains in operation that have transported almost 250,000 people since mid-December, some 1,200 a day, but only a fifth of these passengers opted for the long-distance route, one of the main objectives of the project.
The section that links Cancún, the main tourist destination in the Mexican Caribbean, with Palenque, an important Mayan ruin 850 km to the south, in the state of Chiapas and in the middle of the jungle, opened to the public on January 1 of this year but had an average of 250 passengers a day and only a dozen of them were foreigners.
These figures are still far from the government’s forecasts, which, with the network fully operational, hoped to offer a service with 75 trains that could transport 300 to 500 passengers each, which would mean a minimum offer of more than 22,000 trips per day.
Current daily ridership accounts for 5% of that figure with three of the network’s four main stations—Cancún, Mérida, Palenque and Campeche—already in use.
The cost of that and other railways has led the López Obrador administration to register a budget deficit of almost 6% of the Gross Domestic Product.
For Alfredo Coutiño, director for Latin America at the consulting firm Moody’s, it is common for infrastructure projects to end up being more expensive than expected and to be delivered late, and this case is no exception.
“The accounts are incomplete both in terms of the magnitude of passenger traffic and the operating capacity in terms of the estimated number of trains, which is far below 100%,” he said. “It leaves the burden of its completion to the next administration.”
Future president Claudia Sheinbaum, the official who won the elections by betting on the continuity of López Obrador’s political project, has already announced that she will not only complete the pending sections of the Maya Train for both passengers and cargo but will also open new passenger routes to the north of the country with the same model of military participation as López Obrador.
“The question that remains to be answered,” Coutiño added, “is whether the project will be profitable in the medium term, when it is expected to operate at full capacity and be operated under a government perspective and not as a private company.”
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