Trains to nowhere

Bloomberg have a new piece on the abandoned Abuja Light Rail that was launched with much fanfare by President Buhari in 2018:

In July 2018, Muhammadu Buhari, the president of Nigeria at the time, boarded a gleaming new train linking the capital city, Abuja, with its airport. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Buhari hailed the system as “evidence that we are a government that delivers on its promises.”

Five years on, that promise looks empty. Train cars are locked away at a depot. Cavernous stations fully equipped with escalators, ticket offices, cameras and scanners stand empty, overseen by bored security guards. The faux leather couches in the VIP area are covered in bird and bat droppings. “It’s an abandoned project,” says Rowland Ataguba, an adviser to the government on rail strategy. “Quite clearly there was no plan on how to run the operations before they built it.”

It’s a 27 kilometre line that cost $823 million to complete and the Chinese loans taken to build them are currently costing $50 million a year to service. It was shut down in 2020 and has not worked since then. The Nigerian Urbanism account on YouTube also have a video that tries to explain what went wrong with the line:

There’s also this bit in the Bloomberg piece:

At one end lies the airport, a place where most people who can afford to fly typically arrive by car. At the other end is an isolated area of the so- called Central Business District, where the road in front of the station is more often filled with herders driving cattle to grazing land than anyone headed to or from work. Out back is scrubland where people fleeing violence in the north of the country have built shacks. An additional 18 kilometers of track was built toward the suburbs but never saw any service.

Here we have to pause and wonder: how can so many miles rail track lie unused in a country that barely has any useful infrastructure? The implication here is that if a light rail system like this cannot find any use, then Nigeria does not need (or is not ready for) the amount of infrastructure we think it does.

The immediate answer to that will be that the trains were built in the wrong place, indeed the Bloomberg piece makes this same point. It’s true but then what? It has never been in dispute that rail infrastructure also has the useful purpose of opening up places. And in a situation where the lines have already been built, a hand wringing argument serves no purpose when you’ve spent the best part of a billion dollars already and it’s costing you $50 million a year just to stand still.

Having recently enjoyed the wonders of Japanese trains, they are my go to example here. A piece from some years ago helps to illustrate:

Property-rich private railroad operators in Japan relied on office buildings and mixed-use developments to increase profits for the nine months ended Dec. 31 as their hotels saw slower foreign-tourist-driven growth.

Ten of the country's 14 big listed railway groups reported higher net profit for the period than a year earlier. Japan Railways group members -- the country's bullet train operators -- are considered separate, though some are listed companies.

Tokyu's net profit rose 14% to 57.8 billion yen ($509 million), a record for April-December. The bottom line was lifted by the Futako Tamagawa Rise residential-commercial complex in Tokyo, now in its second year. Depreciation and advertising costs associated with the complex's opening decreased, while Tokyu's office leasing business in Shibuya Ward and other urban neighborhoods was strong. Operating profit in the company's real estate segment grew 13%.

If you’ve already spent money building a rail line without much ridership, there is no use crying about that same point while the infrastructure rots away. The only option you have left is to figure out how to unlock the value in and around the infrastructure. It is hardly a secret that it is quite difficult to make money from trains in a lot of places and there is no shame in relying in other sources of income as a train company to keep the trains running. For everyday the Abuja Light Rail lies unused, the cost of ever getting it back up and running increases with decay and vandalism taking hold. In a country where real estate ‘experts’ and marketers are openly touting the Dangote Refinery as a reason for increase in the value of property around the refinery, how can it be that the value in the land around a rail line cannot pay for the rail itself?

It is one thing to be a poor country dealing with a severe scarcity of resources but it is soul crushingly painful to see wastage of the little resources a can muster.