Best of 2025: Ivo Vegter - Bullet train to nowhere: A high-speed fantasy SA can’t afford

First published on BizNews in July 2025, this widely read critique dismantles plans for a high-speed rail link from Gauteng to Limpopo, questioning costs, timelines and demand. With global examples of failure and local infrastructure in decay, it argues the project is a costly vanity while basics crumble..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Ivo Vegter*.Gauteng and Limpopo provinces are planning a high-speed rail connection. The jackpot question is: why, oh why?Feasibility studies and environmental impact assessments are underway for a new high-speed rail link between Pretoria and Musina, via Hammanskraal, Bela-Bela, Mokopane, Polokwane, and Louis Trichardt (Makhado).The journey, over 470km by road, takes between five and six hours by car. Bus services operate along the route, and there is also an existing train service operated by Shosholoza Meyl, a division of the state-owned Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa. It runs once a week, on Fridays.For some completely inexplicable reason, the political fat cats of Gauteng and Limpopo provinces intend to construct a brand-new high-speed rail line along the route.If that sounds like madness, that’s because it is.UnknownsLittle is known about the intended project. It is unclear how much the project will cost (but think in terms of hundreds of billions of rand). It will be built “alongside” the R120 billion project to expand the Gautrain from 80km in extent to 230km and will link up with the Gautrain in Pretoria.Construction is expected to start in 2026, and the project is to be completed by 2030. (You can wipe the coffee of your screen now. I’ll wait. Back? Good.)It is unclear how fast the new train will run, though it will reportedly cut the travel time between its terminal points to 90 minutes, which would require it to travel at over 300km/h for the entire length of the journey, and not stop or slow down anywhere. (Coffee on the screen again? Sorry.)Nothing at all is known about the intended ridership. Who will pay a premium for a high-speed train from Pretoria to the middle of nowhere?To put it in perspective, Polokwane, the largest town along the route, has a population of a mere 124,000. It doesn’t have a covered train station.Mokopane, which lies 60km south-west of it, has a population of 101,000. No other stop on the route, other than Pretoria itself, has 100,000 people or more.If you rank South Africa’s cities by their formal extent, without grouping them into larger conurbations, Polokwane is 45th on the list of the country’s most populous cities.So, who is going to use this train? Zion Christian Church members, once a year?Six millionThe government’s White Paper on the National Rail Policy says that high-speed rail “complements major conurbations of six million inhabitants or more each”.That might be true, but only if those six million are already fairly rich and doing profitable business with each other.If you’re going to spend gazillions (and expropriate land) to build a high-speed rail network, then at least use it to connect the largest urban areas, where you might find enough passengers who will prefer a fast train to car, bus, taxi, or plane.The entire Limpopo province only just reaches the six million population mark, and most of that population is rural. Its economic activity centres around agriculture, mining, and some tourism. Who is going to ride that train, in numbers?The route northbound from Gauteng is an important freight corridor, but high-speed rail only moves passengers.In short, building a bullet train to Polokwane is either entirely crazy, or assumes a degree of urbanisation and economic growth around its stops that would make demographers wince and economists gasp.High-speed failuresHigh-speed rail has been somewhat successful in the Far East, but not so much in the rest of the world.The infamous HS2 project in the UK, which will one day connect London, via Birmingham, to Manchester, is shorter than the proposed Gauteng-Limpopo line.Its deadlines have slipped repeatedly, and it now won’t be completed until 2040. Its budget has almost doubled, from an initial £56 billion (R1.34 trillion) to £100 billion (R2.4 trillion).In California, a high-speed rail line connecting Los Angeles to San Francisco, about 800km away, was green-lit in 2008.It is now 2025. Construction has started on a 275km section of the line, comprising about 35% of its total length, between Merced and Bakersfield, which have a total population of 500,000 between them. No actual track has been laid yet, and this section is now slated for completion for the early 2030s. The expected cost of this stretch will be $35 billion (R620 billion), which is more than the entire line was supposed to cost originally.By 2045, they expect to reach an “intermediate goal”, which is to connect the towns of Gilroy, 113km south of San Francisco, to Palmdale, 60km north of Los Angeles. There are no firm plans to reach either city, yet, because doing so has turned out to be too complicated and expensive.The cost for the entire line is now expected to reach $128 billion (R2.27 trillion), which is $100 billion (R1.77 trillion) over budget. That budget will probably slip further.We are asked to believe that a bullet train to Limpopo, over 470km, will be operational by 2030. Yeah, right. We’ll still be waiting for it by 2050.Ticket salesHigh-speed rail projects in South Korea and Taiwan were completed successfully, only to be derailed by low ticket sales. And even when utilisation does meet expectations, ticket sales never recoup the investment in high-speed rail. They will always be dependent on government subsidies and justified vaguely as strategic assets.Even the Gautrain, which connects some of the country’s highest population and business concentrations, is not meeting ridership targets. Facing declining passenger numbers, it is unable to justify its huge capital and operational costs, and depends on the taxpayer for nearly R3 billion per year. And that’s before the enormous R120 billion expansion that is planned.If a perfectly ordinary railway line between Pretoria and Musina runs only once a week, where are we going to find enough people to buy tickets for a super-expensive high-speed rail link? What sort of economic activity is such a line going to stimulate that it will pay for the enormous expense of building it?Utterly insaneA high-speed rail link between Johannesburg and Cape Town, which would link South Africa’s two most populous, economically active cities, would be a waste of scarce resources.A vanity project like a bullet train to Limpopo is utterly insane.It will benefit only the construction companies and operators, who, like the Gautrain’s operator, Bombela, will undoubtedly be guaranteed profits at taxpayer expense.Sure, it will “create jobs”, but it would be more cost-efficient to just pay the intended workforce their wages for free.Flashy marvelsSouth Africa doesn’t need flashy first-world marvels that look great on artist’s impressions and investor presentations.This country needs its basic infrastructure to work.South Africa has regular railways that, even before they collapsed in an orgy of corruption and vandalism, could hardly achieve 50km/h. It has companies that subsidise the railway lines on which they depend, because otherwise their mining and export businesses would be dead in the water.Fix the existing railway network, to get passengers and freight back on the train and off the roads. Then, invest in other services that are essential to a thriving economy, such as electricity, water, sewerage, solid waste removal and crime prevention.Our political leaders talk about “smart cities” and “bullet trains” to distract from their criminal failure to provide perfectly ordinary services. The more we hear about those crazy pipe dreams, the worse we should expect the country to fare.Get the basics right. South Africa can’t afford luxuries like high-speed rail, and probably never will.Anyone who says otherwise (I’m looking at you, Cyril Ramaphosa, Panyaza Lesufi, and Phophi Ramathuba) is neither competent nor honest enough to be in government..*Ivo Vegter is a freelance journalistThis article was originally published by Daily Friend and has been republished with permission.

Best of 2025: Ivo Vegter - Bullet train to nowhere: A high-speed fantasy SA can’t afford

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