Spanish High-Speed Rail: Speed, Concrete, and the Limits of the Green Fix

Environment  •  July 26, 2026  •  Adam Novak

Frontiers of Appropriation is a historical ethnography grounded in fieldwork with railway workers, trade unionists, administrators, and anti-HSR activists across Spain and the Basque Country. It combines archival research, interviews, and theoretical work in the tradition of the anthropology of class.¹ The book’s three parts move from financial architecture (the European Investment Bank’s lending model, the construction-sector cartel, the origins of the HSR project in the 1980s Socialist Party modernisation programme) through labour relations (two contrasting railway unions) to territory. On the territorial question, Buier sets two cases against each other: Ciudad Valdeluz, an urban development built around an HSR station 60 km from Madrid, recording a maximum of 133 unique daily passengers in 2014 on a station that cost €15.6-million to build [p.45], and the Basque anti-TAV (Tren de Alta Velocidad, high-speed rail) movement.

Ciudad Valdeluz figures as something more than an anecdote about wasted public money. Buier reads it as a spatial expression of the investment logic itself: a place constituted by the promise of connection that the accumulation model was never designed to honour, where residents bear the costs of imposed mobility while the exchange value of connectivity flows elsewhere. Against that case study stands three decades of organised resistance to a Basque HSR project whose political economy the movement understood better than most academic observers.

The Argument

Buier’s central claim is that the AVE expresses capitalism’s “infrastructural mode” under financialisation. When productive accumulation hits internal limits, capital turns to the built environment: railways, roads, and airports absorb surplus while promising to overcome the friction of distance. High-speed rail is a “quintessential technological fix” [p.2], simultaneously an instrument for absorbing surplus capital and a tool for accelerating its extraction. The more finance capital seeks to dematerialise, the more it requires spectacular physical fixation in concrete.

Buier substantiates this with hard data. Spain spent over €60-billion on the AVE network between 1989 and 2021. In 2012, at the height of austerity, €4.2-billion went to HSR while suburban rail, carrying thirty times more passengers, received €28.5-million, 150 times less. Each minute saved on the Madrid–Barcelona route cost an estimated €39.7-million. Rail’s share of Spain’s modal split for land transport in 2023 stood at 7.2%, below the EU average; road transport was above average at 82.4%. The shorter French HSR network outperformed the Spanish one by roughly six times in passenger-kilometres. Spain’s concrete consumption at the peak of the construction boom broke all European records. Road traffic roughly doubled between 1990 and 2023, exactly the period over which the AVE network was built. Total greenhouse gas emissions remain above 1990 levels.

Europe’s most ambitious HSR programme failed to shift Spain’s mobility paradigm. Buier’s explanation is structural: HSR under capitalism functions as an accumulation strategy that happens to move some people quickly between cities, and its expansion is governed by that logic, not by mobility need.

Beyond Service-Public Critique

The Spanish left has produced a sustained critique of the AVE across more than three decades. Fernando Bermejo of the General Confederation of Labour (CGT)’s federal railway section, writing in El Salto, documented how 67% of the railway investment budget in 2016 went to high-speed lines used by 6.84% of passengers, while cercanías, carrying 87.86% of all rail users, received 5%. Bermejo identified the construction-sector logic directly: “ACS, Ferrovial… in every AVE project the major construction companies appear. These are very costly infrastructures whose investment will never be recovered, except perhaps on one or two specific lines like Madrid–Barcelona.”²

Paco Segura of Ecologistas en Acción put the opportunity cost in blunt terms: “In 2010 and 2011 cuts to social provision came to around €15-billion; we spent €12-billion on the AVE. We need to put it in those terms, we are playing with waiting lists of months for cancer operations.” He added: “It’s a paradox, we remain the European country that dedicates the highest percentage of GDP to transport infrastructure, but the worst in the EU-15 on social provision.”³

According to Joan Ramon Ferrandis of CGT, “in Valencia, annual users have fallen from 24 million in 2008 to 14.5 million in 2018; cercanías ridership in Valencia has been cut by 40% in a decade.” On the national investment pattern, he added: “Historically, public budgets in Spain have allocated 71% to the AVE against 21% for conventional rail. Of more than 580 million annual journeys, more than 95% are on conventional rail, while AVE use is below 5%.”⁴ Antoni Infante, writing in Viento Sur in February 2026 following two fatal rail accidents, a collision at Adamuz (Córdoba) in January 2026 that killed several passengers, and a derailment at Gelida (Catalonia) weeks earlier, both on underinvested conventional lines, documented the disparity: “Over the past thirty-five years, more than €60-billion has been invested in deploying the high-speed network, a significant portion from EU funds and public debt financing. This contrasts radically with the €3.6-billion allocated to cercanías infrastructure between 1990 and 2018, of which nearly 48% was concentrated exclusively in the Madrid hub.”⁵ The critique, that the AVE socialises costs while concentrating benefits on elite long-distance travellers and the construction sector, is correct and has been consistently made.

Buier’s contribution is to explain why this disparity is reproduced regardless of which party governs. The existing left critique frames the AVE as misallocation: irrational centralisation, political clientelism, construction-sector capture. These are real. But they leave unanswered the underlying question: why do successive Socialist Party (PSOE) and People’s Party (PP) governments, fully aware of the cercanías crisis, continue to channel capital into HSR expansion? The investment logic is structural necessity under financialised accumulation, not political irrationality. The European Investment Bank (EIB) is a conservative lender that has recorded surplus in every year of its existence and has used Spanish infrastructure investment to advance a Europe-wide liberalisation model, binding EU grants to the progressive opening of the rail market to competition. The “EU money” explanation, which Buier heard repeatedly from workers, officials, and journalists, displaces political responsibility onto supranational largesse, when in fact the EIB’s lending model enrolled enthusiastic Spanish actors into a broader project of debt-financed liberalisation.

Post-liberalisation, three operators compete on the AVE’s most profitable corridors. Punctuality has deteriorated sharply: 1% of HSR trains were late in 2019; by 2024, 6% were delayed, with average delays rising to 24 minutes. Báez Boza reported that “the outsourcing process has led to an increase in traffic: in the past seven years the number of trains running on the high-speed network has increased by 46%.”⁶

Labour and the Modernisation Nexus

The book’s most analytically original contribution concerns railway labour relations. Buier follows two unions: SEMAF (Sindicato Español de Maquinistas y Ayudantes Ferroviarios), the train drivers’ craft union founded in the mid-1980s, and the CGT’s railway section.

SEMAF’s rise was partly engineered from above. An internal RENFE (Red Nacional de los Ferrocarriles Españoles, the national railway operator) management memoir, cited by Buier, records that the personnel director “could think of nothing better than to strongly encourage SEMAF to divide the majority CCOO and UGT” [p.90]. The Workers’ Commissions (CCOO) and the General Workers’ Union (UGT) were Spain’s two dominant class-based union confederations. The strategy succeeded in fragmenting class-based unionism and produced its own instabilities: SEMAF eventually agreed to abolish the two-person driving arrangement in 2000, a concession to management obtained under the guise of professional modernisation.

The AVE provided SEMAF with a source of professional dignity that decoupled drivers’ interests from those of other railway workers. The driver became identified with the machine: modern, technically skilled, a quasi-pilot. That identification made SEMAF a reliable ally of HSR expansion, including the institutional separation of infrastructure management from service provision, a restructuring that further fragmented collective bargaining. Bermejo and Ferrandis, writing in the Spanish left press, represent the opposing CGT tradition: class analysis at the level of the whole network. Buier’s account of SEMAF shows structurally why that tradition was systematically outmanœuvred: technological upgrading segmented labour, eroded solidarity, and produced a workforce whose professional identity was tied to a capital-intensive mode of production that excluded most railway workers.

Territory and the Limits of the Nationalist Frame

Buier’s account of the Basque anti-TAV movement directly challenges an influential position within the Spanish left. The “Basque Y”, 180.5 km connecting Bilbao, Vitoria, and San Sebastián, more than 60% tunnels, 2026 cost estimate €9-billion, completion projected no earlier than 2030, is the most expensive infrastructure project in the region’s history. An independent study by the EKOPOL (Grupo de Investigación en Economía Política) research group at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), commissioned by the ELA and LAB Basque trade union confederations, found that even in the most optimistic scenarios the Basque Y would not compensate the CO2 emissions generated by its construction and maintenance within its 60-year service life, and would not achieve net energy savings before 55 years of service.

The dominant frame in Valencian and Catalan left coverage, Infante’s “colonisation” argument, Ferrandis’s data on Valencian cercanías underfunding, correctly identifies territorial inequality in AVE investment but attributes it primarily to Spanish centralisation. The implication is that regional control of rail management would address the structural problem. In an interview in El Salto in August 2022, conducted by Ekaitz Cancela, the Newcastle University specialist Diego García-Mejuto located the TAV within the internal logic of Basque hegemonic politics: “The promotion of Basque business and industrial competitiveness and the integration of its economy into Europe have been decisive elements in legitimating the accumulation strategy.”⁷

According to García-Mejuto, “in 2005 the Basque Nationalist Party, through its presence in the Congress, secured an agreement to begin works on the line in exchange for its support for the following year’s General State Budget. This conditioning of budget support on advancing the works was repeated recently: in the 2017 budget, the government agreed financing commitments for the line with the PNV.”⁸ García-Mejuto also identified the double meaning of vertebración del territorio (territorial articulation): “the concept indicates precisely a geography or spatial arrangement that enables capital accumulation, and in contemporary Europe has a transnational dimension. But it is also a concept that has been used with a meaning closer to national construction. Indeed, ‘vertebración’, or its absence, has been used frequently in debates about the ‘problema español’.”⁹ That ambiguity is what makes it politically serviceable for both the PNV and the central state.

Buier’s historical ethnography confirms this analysis. Basque developmentalism, structured around an integrated “Basque City” competing within the EU’s Atlantic corridor, converges with Spanish developmentalism rather than opposing it. Both share the same accumulation logic: connectivity as competitive advantage, HSR as metropolitan growth infrastructure.

AHT Gelditu! Elkarlana (Stop TAV! Platform), combining anarcho-syndicalists, the abertzale left, agricultural unions, and environmental organisations under the slogan “the TAV is more than a train” [p.174], grasped from the outset that the question was territorial and class-based: what kind of space is being produced, for whom, and at whose expense. The analysis applies equally to the Valencian and Catalan cases. Indeed, the Basque anti-TAV struggle belongs to a broader European movement.¹⁰ The structural problem is not solved by transferring rail management to regional governments whose economic development models share the same metropolitan-connectivity logic.

The limits of the Basque Country struggle are well understood. Internal tensions between anarcho-syndicalist tendencies and the abertzale left repeatedly surfaced. The movement delayed construction significantly but could not stop it. Once the EIB has committed its lending, once the tunnelling companies have won their tenders, once the concrete has been poured, the “ideologies immanent to fixed capital” [p.169] become structurally resistant to challenge from below.

Where the Book Takes us Forward

Frontiers of Appropriation provides a theoretical frame for analysing infrastructure investment that extends well beyond Spain. The “infrastructural mode” of finance capital underlies EU green transition plans channelling NextGenerationEU funds into HSR expansion, in national recovery packages treating railway megaprojects as job-creation mechanisms, and in left-accelerationist positions that imagine decarbonisation through technological upgrade rather than mobility reduction. Buier shows how HSR’s carbon credentials depend on overestimated modal shift, exaggerated demand forecasts, and incomplete life-cycle assessment. The green transition case for rail is the case for the conventional rail network, carrying the overwhelming majority of passengers and freight, that has been systematically starved of investment to finance high-speed spectacle.

Buier correctly refuses both the liberal cost-benefit framework and the technologist left’s embrace of HSR as green infrastructure, but the question of what a socialist transport policy would actually require, how the inherited network should be managed, on what terms liberalisation should be reversed, how the debt of ADIF (Administrador de Infraestructuras Ferroviarias, the state railway infrastructure manager) should be handled, is not addressed. The Spanish left press has begun answering this question: CGT-València calls for renationalisation and staffing increases; Infante calls for territorial management transfers; El Salto’s correspondents call for a moratorium on new HSR lines. Buier’s book provides the theoretical basis for evaluating which of these responses addresses the structural problem and which merely rearranges its distribution.

The book’s two central concepts, the “HSR-finance complex” and the “HSR-modernisation nexus”, are analytically distinguishable but in practice sometimes operate as a description of what the two halves of the argument will cover rather than as a productive tension between them. The HSR-finance complex designates the incorporation of HSR into the cycle of accumulation: the EIB model, the construction cartel, the absorption of surplus capital. It explains why the AVE expands regardless of ridership figures or modal-split outcomes. The HSR-modernisation nexus designates the social relations through which subordination to capitalist imperatives is reproduced at the level of lived experience, the Socialist Party’s anti-Francoist rhetoric, the new company culture, the craft-union incorporation. Where the two concepts are brought into direct contact, most forcefully in the SEMAF case, where the finance complex and the modernisation nexus visibly produced each other, the analysis is at its strongest. Where each concept is deployed separately, the argument can feel schematic. The ethnographic material carries the argument more effectively than the sections where the conceptual apparatus is restated.

Frontiers of Appropriation is essential reading for ecosocialists working on European green transition policy, and for anyone attempting to understand what the EU’s infrastructure agenda actually does to the territories and workforces it passes through. •

This article first published on the Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières website.

1. Buier’s intellectual debts to Don Kalb, Susana Narotzky, and Gavin Smith are openly acknowledged.
2. Pablo Rivas, “Último tren con destino al pueblo,” El Salto, 16 February 2016. Fernando Bermejo, Communications Secretary of the CGT’s Federal Railway Section: “ACS, Ferrovial… en todas las obras del AVE aparecen las grandes constructoras. Son infraestructuras muy costosas, cuya inversión no se va a recuperar nunca, salvo quizá alguna línea puntual como Madrid-Barcelona.”
3. Paco Segura, transport specialist at Ecologistas en Acción: “En 2010 y 2011 los recortes en prestaciones sociales rondaron los 15.000 millones, en AVE gastamos 12.000. Hay que ponerlo en estos términos, estamos jugando con listas de espera de meses para operaciones de cáncer. Es una paradoja, seguimos siendo el país europeo que más porcentaje del PIB dedica a infraestructuras de transporte, pero el peor de la UE de los 15 en prestaciones sociales.” Cited in Pablo Rivas, “Último tren con destino al pueblo,” El Salto, 16 February 2016.
4. Enric Llopis, “El Estado español prioriza la Alta Velocidad sobre el tren público, social y sostenible,” Rebelión, 24 February 2022. Joan Ramon Ferrandis, member of the CGT’s Railway Defence Platform and railway worker: “En Valencia se ha pasado de 24 millones de usuarios anuales en 2008 a 14,5 millones en 2018; es decir, los pasajeros del tren de cercanías en Valencia se han reducido el 40% en una década.” On the investment disproportion: “En un promedio histórico, los presupuestos públicos han representado en el estado español una inversión del 71% para el AVE, en contraposición al 21% para el ferrocarril convencional. Según los datos de CGT, de los más de 580 millones de viajes anuales, más del 95% corresponden al tren convencional, mientras que la utilización del AVE es inferior al 5%.”
5. Antoni Infante, “El colapso de un modelo ferroviario al servicio del capital y la colonización,” Viento Sur, 13 February 2026. Originally published in Diari La Veu del País Valencià. Relevant passage: “En los últimos treinta y cinco años se han invertido más de 60.000 millones de euros en el despliegue de la red de alta velocidad, con una parte significativa procedente de fondos europeos y financiación mediante deuda pública. Este volumen contrasta radicalmente con los 3.600 millones destinados a la infraestructura de cercanía entre 1990 y 2018 – el servicio ferroviario que transporta la inmensa mayoría de usuarios y usuarias – de los cuales cerca del 48% se concentraron exclusivamente en el núcleo de Madrid.”
6. Aurora Báez Boza, “El accidente de Adamuz pone en duda el modelo ferroviario: velocidad, liberalización y falta de fiscalización,” El Salto, 26 January 2026. Relevant passage: “El proceso de externalización ha llevado además a que se produzca un incremento en la circulación, en los últimos siete años el número de trenes que han recorrido la red de alta velocidad ha aumentado en un 46%.”
7. Ekaitz Cancela, “Diego García-Mejuto: ‘El TAV es una forma de integrarse en el proyecto neoliberal de Europa, no de ganar soberanía para Euskadi’,” El Salto, 14 August 2022. The framing is the journalist Ekaitz Cancela’s; García-Mejuto confirms it affirmatively. Relevant passages from the interview: “El fomento de la competitividad empresarial e industrial vasca y la integración de su economía en Europa han sido elementos decisivos en la legitimación de la estrategia de acumulación.” And, on the question of whether the TAV is a form of integration into the European neoliberal project: “Sí. En la visión hegemónica territorial vasca, la integración económica en Europa ha ocupado un lugar fundamental.”
8. Ekaitz Cancela, “Diego García-Mejuto: ‘El TAV es una forma de integrarse en el proyecto neoliberal de Europa, no de ganar soberanía para Euskadi’,” El Salto, 14 August 2022. Relevant passage: “En 2005 el Partido Nacionalista Vasco, a través de su presencia en el Congreso, consiguió arrancar un acuerdo para iniciar las obras de la línea a cambio de su apoyo a los Presupuestos Generales del Estado del año siguiente. Este condicionamiento del apoyo a los Presupuestos al impulso de las obras se ha repetido recientemente: en los de 2017, el Gobierno acordó con el PNV compromisos de financiación de la línea.”
9. Ekaitz Cancela, “Diego García-Mejuto: ‘El TAV es una forma de integrarse en el proyecto neoliberal de Europa, no de ganar soberanía para Euskadi’,” El Salto, 14 August 2022. Relevant passage: “El concepto ‘vertebración del territorio’ indica precisamente una geografía o arreglo espacial que permita la acumulación del capital, y que tiene en la Europa contemporánea una dimensión transnacional. Pero es un concepto, en mi opinión, muy interesante porque también se ha utilizado con un significado más cercano a la construcción nacional. De hecho, ‘vertebración’ (o la falta de ella) se ha usado frecuentemente en debates sobre el ‘problema español’.”
10. On the Italian No-TAV movement and the French opposition to the Lyon-Turin project, see the ESSF dossier: No-TAV: contre le projet écocide Lyon-Turin et son monde (June 2023). The NPA’s contribution argues that the €40-billion earmarked for the Lyon-Turin tunnel could instead reopen more than 13,000 km of regional rail lines, and identifies Vinci, Bouygues, Eiffage and Colas as the real beneficiaries, the same construction-sector logic Buier identifies in the Spanish case.