MEXICO CITY (AP) — President’s pet rail project Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador could ultimately cost as much as $30 billion, is only halfway complete as he enters the final two months of his term, and has major damage to the environment.
But the most damning assessment of the Maya Train, a tourist line that loops around the Yucatán Peninsula, is the ridership on about half of the now-open line: Only about 1,200 people a day ride the train, according to government figures released Monday.
Most people only drive short distances with it between the city of Merida and Cancun, or the nearby city of Campeche. The great hope to defray the enormous cost of the train was that tourists would take it from the resort of Cancun and travel the entire 950-mile (1,500-kilometer) route to visit the Mayan archaeological sites that dot the peninsula.
But a roundtrip route from Cancun to the famed Mayan temple complex of Palenque has attracted only about 100 passengers each way per day in its first six months of operation. That’s a volume that a bus or two a day could handle.
The government originally promised that the train would carry between 22,000 and 37,000 people per day. Current ridership is about 3-5% of that, with three of the four most popular stations — Cancun, Merida, Palenque and Campeche — already in operation.
Granted, the railway line The busy corridor connecting Cancun to the resorts of Playa del Carmen and Tulum — an area known as the Riviera Maya — is not yet completed and only has 17 trains running; eventually three times that number could be added.
But critics say there is little hope that the Cancun-Tulum line will make the project profitable, as it not exactly running close one of the resorts it should serve.
The Cancun-Tulum railway was originally supposed to run on an elevated line along the coastal road, where most of the hotels are located. But due to technical problems, the government changed the route, cutting a 110-kilometer (68-mile) strip through the jungle and moving the tracks about 7 kilometers (4.3 miles) inland.
Instead of taking one of the minibuses that constantly ply the coastal road, tourists or resort workers must take a taxi to the train station, wait for one of the few daily trains, and then take another taxi to the resorts once they reach their destination.
“The futility of this project was foreseeable,” said Jose “Pepe” Urbina, a local diver who opposes the train because its steel poles have damaged the caves he has been exploring for decades. “In reality, the train doesn’t go anywhere you couldn’t go by highway before.”
“These are railway lines that do not provide any useful service to workers, students or other daily needs,” Urbina said.
The rail project has at least created jobs: Manuel Merino, the governor of the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco, said the Maya Train had created 20,000 direct and indirect jobs in his state and reduced the unemployment rate by 40%.
“This really makes it an engine for development in the south,” a historically poorer and underdeveloped part of Mexico, Merino said. But most of those jobs will disappear once construction is finished, and federal officials are also looking for ways to make the railroad pay for itself.
Officials have indicated that freight trains could also run on the rails, but there is little industry in the region and therefore demand for freight transport is limited.
It’s unclear whether the government ever thought the railway would be profitable. López Obrador had already decided to build it before feasibility studies were conducted. According to a 2019 government study, the railway would cost $8.5 billion and the estimated benefits would be around $10.5 billion.
But those “estimated benefits” always included a lot of intangible things, like less traffic on the highways, faster travel or higher tourism revenues, none of which happened or had anything to do with the train.
Alfredo Coutiño, Director of Analytics at Moody’s, noted that cost overruns are common in such projects.
“As expected, the Maya Train project was not completed as planned and the costs far exceeded the initial budget,” Coutiño wrote.
“The question that remains to be answered is whether this project will be profitable in the medium term, when it is expected to be fully functional, operating at full capacity and managed as a government enterprise rather than a private enterprise.”
