Africa Has a High-Speed Train; California Doesn’t – The Antiplanner

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Africa Has a High-Speed Train; California Doesn’t

By The Antiplanner | July 30, 2026 - 12:00 am |July 30, 2026 Transportation

"Yes, you read that right," enthuses California journalist Joe Mathews. "Morocco has high-speed rail. And California has excuses."

Morocco’s high-speed train goes up to 200 miles per hour — but averages just 88 miles per hour. Photo by NicholasNCE.

At first glance, Morocco’s high-speed train, known as Al Boraq ("the lightning"), sounds pretty amazing. It goes up to 200 miles per hour. Costing just $10 million per mile, it cut the travel time between Casablanca and Tangier from 4-3/4 hours to 2-1/4 hours.

Up close, it isn’t quite as amazing. While the route is 201 miles, only 116 miles were built new; the other 85 miles was existing track whose top speed is 100 miles per hour. Still, that’s no more than $18 million a mile for the new construction. The average speed from Casablanca to Tangier is about 88 miles an hour, indicating that not many miles reach the top speed of 200 miles per hour.

Al Boraq opened in November, 2018, and ridership has grown from 3 million riders in 2019 to 5.6 million in 2025. Morocco has only about one-seventh as many vehicles per capita as the United States. For some reason, there is no or almost no non-stop airline service between the two cities, so for most people the train is the only way to go. Although the Morocco railroad, ONCF, carries both passengers and freight, it loses money.

To support its claims that California trains will cover their operating costs, the state High-Speed Rail Authority continues to insist that its trains will carry 28 million trips per year. At 37 million, Morocco‘s population is about the same as California’s 39 million. California’s high-speed trains will be a little faster but its major cities are much further apart so the time between them will be greater than in Morocco. If Morocco can only attract 5.5 million trips, California is not likely to reach 28 million.

These points don’t diminish Mathew’s fundamental point, which is why is California’s high-speed rail project costing more than $200 million per mile when Morocco’s is under $20 million per mile? One answer is that California’s route has to go over two major mountain ranges while Morocco’s is mostly flat, but even the flat parts of California’s line are $200 million a mile.

California expects its trains will go 220 miles per hour and to average at least 175 mph between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Each increment in rail speeds is increasingly expensive, so going from 200 to 220 can massively increase the cost, not to mention from 88 to 175. California’s train also had some regulatory hurdles that probably didn’t slow down construction of the Moroccan train.

California’s train was particularly slowed by the high cost of land and property owners who didn’t want their lands taken by eminent domain. This was almost certainly not a problem in Morocco, where land values are lower and government agencies such as the state-owned railroad can easily expropriate land for their purposes.

However, the biggest difference in costs is the price of labor. The average income for a U.S. construction worker is more than $50,000 a year while the average in Morocco is under $13,000 (one Moroccan dirham is worth about US10.6¢). The difference in the labor cost of materials going into the project is even greater as overall U.S. median incomes are more than fourteen times greater than Morocco’s. While the exact share of construction costs that are due to labor is difficult to calculate, it is likely that labor costs alone explain a majority of the difference in construction costs in the two countries.

Even if California’s high-speed rail project could be built for the same cost as Morocco’s, it wouldn’t be worth it. In 1996, University of California, Berkeley engineering researcher David Levinson estimated the cost of a high-speed rail ticket from San Francisco to Los Angeles compared with the cost of flying or driving. No one had estimated the cost of construction yet, so he assumed it would be $10 billion, or less than 5 percent of what it turned out to be. At that cost, he concluded, the train would be considerably more expensive than flying and slightly more expensive than driving. While his construction cost estimate was low, his ridership assumption was probably a lot more realistic than the state’s.

Morocco, a developing nation with low labor costs and low rates of automobile ownership, doesn’t have much to teach the U.S. about transportation. The real question about California’s high-speed rail remains: why are we trying to build an infrastructure-heavy project that will cost more and be slower than flying and cost more and be less convenient than driving?

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