Mexico sets $100 billion rail, ports, roads plan

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The Mexican government announced plans Monday to invest about $100 billion in rail, road, telecom and port projects over the next five years, including Mexico’s first high-speed rail links.


“Mexico can be the great logistics platform for Latin America,” Transportation Secretary Gerardo Ruiz Esparza said. “We have to create significant savings in the time and cost of transporting goods.”





“Nobody can doubt that better infrastructure translates into more competitiveness and productivity, which will ignite economic growth and social well-being,” Pena Nieto said. “These are investments that will translate into jobs.”



“Mexico really doesn’t have the characteristics for high speed trains,” said Jorge Fernandez Acosta, an architecture professor specializing in urban design and transport issues. “Our terrain is very mountainous, very extreme.”

Fernandez Acosta said he liked better Pena Nieto’s proposal to build a light-rail urban transport project in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, but noted “even that wouldn’t be a complete solution” for the traffic-clogged metropolis.

Pena Nieto will also have to reverse the poor reputation that the state-run trains built up in their final years, before service was cancelled in 1999. Trains often stopped inexplicably for hours, air conditioning broke down, cars moved at a snail’s pace and sometimes took days to reach their destination.

But Tsung-Chung Kao, a professor at the railroad engineering program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, noted that “every country goes through that,” convincing passengers that modern high-speed trains are not like their old versions.

“Every country that builds a first high-speed line, builds a second,” Kao, noting “All around the world, people are building like crazy.”


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