A $170 Million Ride to Nowhere
The cables still hang above Antananarivo's steep hills. No cars move along them. Madagascar — a country where poverty affects roughly 75% of its 30 million people and the average commuter earns around $72 a month — is now sitting on a $173 million transit project financed with French loans that operated for only a few weeks before going effectively dark.
Former President Andry Rajoelina inaugurated the cable car system in 2024, calling it a landmark moment comparable to France building the Eiffel Tower. Officials projected the system could carry up to 75,000 passengers a day, remove 2,000 vehicles from congested roads, and cut commutes from as long as three hours down to between 10 and 30 minutes depending on the route.
None of that materialized at scale.
The price killed it before politics did. Authorities set fares at between 70 and 90 U.S. cents per trip — six to eight times the cost of a minibus taxi ride. In a city where most commuters cannot absorb that premium, the choice was simple: sit in traffic.
'Obviously people will not use it because money is far more key than time,' said Pieter Onderwater, a public transport planning consultant and guest lecturer at the Center for Transport Studies at the University of Cape Town. 'The price is six times higher than a conventional taxi? Well then, we just sit in traffic because we know better things to do with that money.'
The system also suffered from electricity outages that repeatedly halted operations — a pointed irony in a capital where residents had long complained about unreliable power and water. 'In a city where they cannot even fix the roads, how can we trust being more than 20 meters above the ground when there is a power cut?' said Erica, an Antananarivo shop owner who gave only her first name.
Then came the coup. Rajoelina was deposed in a military takeover late last year following youth-led protests alleging widespread government failures. During the unrest, some cable car stations were burned or damaged as demonstrators accused the government of being out of touch with ordinary citizens' needs. A transitional government led by former army colonel Michael Randrianirina took power in October and has not announced any plan for the cable cars. The government did not respond to press questions.
A consortium that built the system conducted an inspection in March and submitted findings to Madagascar authorities 'to decide on the next steps,' according to a French company involved in the project.
Antananarivo was designed for 300,000 residents; it now holds an estimated three million. Africa's urban population of 700 million is projected to double by 2050, according to the OECD, creating enormous demand for transit, housing, health infrastructure, water, and electricity.
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The Madagascar cable car is a case study in what happens when prestige infrastructure crowds out basic services. The project was financed with borrowed money, priced beyond the reach of the people it was meant to serve, and rolled out in a city that still cannot guarantee reliable electricity — the very utility the cars depended on. Rajoelina framed it as modernization; his constituents read it as a monument to misplaced priorities, and they said so in the streets.
Free enterprise works when price signals are honest and capital flows toward genuine demand. State-directed vanity projects — however well-packaged — invert that logic: they consume scarce public resources, saddle poor populations with debt, and deliver nothing the market would have funded on its own. The cables hanging empty above Antananarivo are not an infrastructure story. They are a fiscal accountability story, and the taxpayer — in one of the world's least-wealthy nations — is holding the bill.
