It is hard to write about high speed after the Urda accident. I am in favor of staying silent for many days following a tragedy with irreparable consequences for so many families. I have always found it difficult to find, in the moments after something so grave, the calm necessary for a serene reflection. I don’t know if the moment has arrived yet, but I will try.
The enormous amount of data and opinions published since the grim morning of October 28 allows us to have a fairly precise picture of the state of high speed. However, there has not been enough depth on two key topics: how decisions are made about investments in infrastructure and how the maintenance of the enormous capital accumulated is paid for, which we keep expanding.
In reality, the focus has been placed on the governance of the railway system, although the debate has centered on the alleged politicization of many technical positions at Adif and Renfe, as well as the instability of their leadership teams. The narrative that emerges from that approach is one of political interference in technical decisions. My thesis is the opposite: what Spain has lacked for some time is that politics set priorities in infrastructure with transparency and courage for the technicians to execute them.
The absence of a strategy that goes beyond simply continuing to build kilometers of AVE and expressways is not attributable only to the last government, because infrastructures have been, de facto, one of the few state policies in Spain, with notable continuity since the 1990s. That is what I wrote a few months ago in these same pages.
Overprovision of infrastructure and insufficient maintenance
The Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility (AIReF) published in 2020 the most comprehensive assessment to date of investments in transport infrastructure, including the AVE network, which I had the responsibility to lead. The report, heavily cited in recent weeks, concluded that the AVE significantly reduced travel times between provinces, but failed to meet its objective of improving territorial cohesion, since it benefited more the provinces that were already better connected, and especially Madrid.
“The absence of a strategy that goes beyond simply continuing to build kilometers of AVE and expressways is not attributable only to the last government”
Furthermore, the cost-benefit analysis confirmed earlier academic studies and demonstrated social returns ranging from zero to minimal across all AVE corridors, albeit with differences. Only the Madrid-Barcelona and Madrid-Seville-Málaga corridors come close to the minimum required, while the northern and Levante corridors, still unfinished, are very far away and will probably worsen when completed. Neither liberalization nor other favorable scenarios significantly altered this outcome.
That is why AIReF recommended reevaluating the nearly 5,600 kilometers of AVE then pending, investing more in Cercanías and focusing efforts on maintaining and using the existing network more intensively. But the most relevant recommendation was to modify governance, that is, the way decisions have led to an enormous over-dimensioning of major transport infrastructures compared with almost any country in the world and certainly with the major European states.
Anna Matas and José Manuel Vassallo updated the data a few months ago in a study published by Funcas and their conclusions are even more forceful. With an index that weights population and area, Spain almost triples the European average in high-speed railway kilometers and exceeds it by more than 80% in expressways and highways, far above Germany, France or Italy. And they bluntly conclude that there has been “an excessive bias toward high-capacity infrastructure”.
The study by the two professors also confirms another key point: starting in 2008, with the onset of the great financial crisis, there was a sharp drop in investment, much more pronounced than in the major European countries. Spain went from investing more than 2.2% of GDP in infrastructure in 2009 to only 0.6% in 2018. This decline, affecting all modes of transport, has resulted in a reduction of the stock of capital. Put more plainly: resources have been insufficient to cover the maintenance and preservation expenses necessary to avoid depreciation of the infrastructures.
“From 2008, with the start of the great financial crisis, there was a sharp fall in investment, much more pronounced than in the major European countries”
It is a conclusion that goes beyond the fluctuations of the latest governments or the management of each minister. A leap in maintenance spending is necessary, a leap of billions of euros that requires a national commitment. Spain has accumulated a railway network, roads, ports, airports and hydraulic infrastructures of such extent and capacity that it needs to allocate more and more resources just to maintain them. The two professors quantify it for roads: applying the World Bank criterion, in 2023 only 55% of what was necessary was allocated to maintenance, so more than 2,000 million euros annually would be needed to keep them in good condition. In railways there is no such precise estimate, but maintenance expenditure per train-kilometer is also clearly insufficient. In dams, the safety and modernization needs have been estimated at over 4,500 million.
“From 2008, with the start of the great financial crisis, there was a sharp fall in investment, much more pronounced than in the major European countries”
The tension between maintenance and expansion of networks is not exclusive to Spain. It is a problem shared by developed countries and expresses a politically very difficult contradiction to manage. The incentive for any official, and what society values, is the growth of networks: new roads, stations or rail lines. Cutting ribbons. Maintaining what exists does not generate political capital, until a accident occurs and then it is withdrawn abruptly.
Deciding with calm
Infrastructure policy has an extraordinary inertia, which even overwhelms those who lead it. What happened with the Seville-Huelva AVE line reflects this in the starkest terms. On April 15, 2024, Óscar Puente, then Minister of Transport, publicly ruled out the construction of a full new line: “It will take us a huge amount of time and a monstrous investment.” He advocated a partial variant that, with roughly a third of the investment, would extend the journey by barely ten minutes. Less than ten months later, the ministry announced a new 95-kilometer line and 1,608 million euros to connect the two cities in twenty-five minutes. The initial cost of saving ten minutes will be over 1,000 million euros. More than the mistake of a minister, it is the demonstration of impotence and how hard it is to order a halt when all territorial actors, including those from his own party, push in the same direction.
“The incentive for any official, and what society values, is the growth of networks: new roads, stations or railway lines”
The problem is not in the diagnoses, but in the capacity to make difficult decisions with the necessary calm. There are many other recent examples besides Huelva that deserved a more serene reflection. Let us keep two. Did it make sense to lift tolls on the AP-7 in Catalonia for all vehicles and users? The result has been a sharp increase in traffic, especially trucks, more congestion and more incidents on a key artery for the region.
Did it make sense to simultaneously bring in two operators to the high-speed network, coinciding with the pandemic and with the complete renewal of the Madrid-Seville line, and without achieving in return the opening of the French and Italian markets to Renfe?
The liberalization has been a success in terms of travelers and prices and does not by itself explain the accidents, but the seams of the system are evidently very tense. Shouldn’t the experiences of our neighbors, with much more prudent and gradual processes, have served as a reference?
Who pays?
At this point, and with the electoral campaign about to begin, the big elephant in the room of the infrastructure future for the new political cycle appears, whatever the election result. How are we going to substantially increase maintenance spending and, at the same time, sustain the enormous investments underway to expand and improve the network?
“Did it make sense to simultaneously bring in two operators to the high-speed network, coinciding with the pandemic and with the complete renewal of the Madrid-Seville line, and without achieving in return the opening of the French and Italian markets to Renfe?”
The list of commitments is long. The arrival of the AVE to Almería, the Burgos connection with the Basque Y and its completion, the Palencia-Santander corridor, the Loja variant on the route to Granada, the pending sections of the AVE to Extremadura and Navarra, and the new Seville-Huelva. Add to this the works in the conventional network and the serious Cercanías crisis in Madrid and Rodalies in Catalonia, networks that require substantial investments just to maintain their functionality, even though expansion is always postponed, as usual, to after these improvements, which are essential to serve expanding metropolitan areas due to population growth and rising housing costs.
All this coincides with the end of the extraordinary investment push of the Next Generation funds, with a strong need to increase spending on defense and electrical grids and with the huge social challenge of creating a public housing stock. And a part of the political spectrum also promises tax cuts. It is very difficult for public budgets, especially if revenues fall, to sustain both lines of spending, maintain and expand, without choosing. No party has clarified how to fit that puzzle.
There is another little-known fact. The expansion of the high-speed network has been financed largely with debt of a public entity that, however, is not integrated within the perimeter of the Public Administrations. It thus remains outside the public debt indicator, which recently fell below 100% of GDP. Adif Alta Velocidad, the body that builds and manages the AVE network, closed 2025 with a financial debt of a little over €20 billion, about €2.9 billion more than two years earlier. It is the equivalent of almost 1.2% of GDP.
“It is very difficult for public budgets, and even more so if revenues fall, to sustain both lines of spending, maintaining and expanding, without choosing”
Other possible sources of resources, such as road usage fees or other similar mechanisms, are not even on the table, nor will they appear in the electoral campaign. The measure agreed in 2021 with the European Commission as a reform in the Recovery Plan to establish a mechanism to pay for the use of Spain’s state roads did not gain enough support in Congress despite the risk of losing several hundreds of millions of euros of Next Generation funds: the opposition, the whole transport sector, and even one of the Government’s own partners rejected it. Spain remains one of the few large European Union countries that does not charge for the use of its expressways, not even to trucks or foreign visitors, even though it receives about 100 million international tourists each year.
A new governance for the next decade
Something has moved. The 2025 Sustainable Mobility Law incorporates some AIReF recommendations and introduces ex ante and ex post evaluations of projects, but leaves out the one that AIReF and the OECD considered decisive: an independent evaluation. And nothing guarantees that past mistakes will not be repeated. The goal for the next decade should be to build a new governance so that increasing the allocation for large infrastructures stops being the sole objective.
“The objective for the next decade should be to build a new governance so that increasing the allocation for large infrastructures stops being the sole objective”
France offers a useful reference. Its Conseil d’Orientation des Infrastructures (COI), formed by elected officials and experts, has been since 2018 prioritizing projects according to the budget framework. Its latest report, published this spring, has a title that says it all: Grands projets: le temps des choix (Big projects: the time to choose). It does not decide for the Government, but gives it technical and plural backing to say no to a project, a political cost that in Spain today falls entirely on the minister in charge. There are many other international examples that could be used as references.
What this is about, in short, is deciding what to do first and how to pay for it. Strengthening maintenance demands a huge amount of resources, something probably incompatible with sustaining the ambitious expansion of the network and, at the same time, not loading the cost onto future generations. There will have to be a choice: prioritizing, finding new sources of funding, or, likely, doing both.
The first step means placing the preservation of what has been built and metropolitan networks, where the vast majority of rail travel takes place, at the front: in 2025, Cercanías carried around 450 million passengers, compared to 44.5 million on commercial high speed. And this will likely force a review of the schedule for some pending sections and works.
“Strengthening maintenance demands a huge amount of resources, something probably incompatible with sustaining the ambitious expansion of the network and, at the same time, not loading its cost onto future generations”
The second step involves opening the debate about how to obtain more revenue without drama: tolling of high-capacity routes for heavy vehicles, or a vignette that tourists arriving by road would also pay, a revision of railway charges, or greater capture of the value that new infrastructures generate in the land around them.
None of this is resolved in an electoral campaign or in the weeks following a tragedy. Precisely for that reason, it is worth finally starting to talk about it now, with data and with the serenity that these lines began with, and address once and for all the fundamental decisions we have postponed for decades.
Hopefully this time the debate will not fade away when the noise dies down.
