Challenges and Opportunities Associated with Connecting the Yucatan Peninsula by Rail
As a civil engineering student at Georgia Tech, I am interested in transportation megaprojects and how these infrastructure projects impact all components of a region’s sustainability. Studying more about the Mayan Train, a project I was vaguely aware of beforehand, although only from a tourism perspective, was a great opportunity to combine my two academic interests, both Civil Engineering and Spanish.
Discovering the Mayan Train
At first, I was surprised by how many different opinions there seemed to be about the purpose and promise of the Mayan Train. However, as I continued to read more information about the project, it was interesting to learn about all of these complex perspectives and compare how unique backgrounds differed. What surprised me most was how quickly the project was built, although the legality of the process remains controversial. Here in the United States, megaprojects are subject to intense federal regulations and costly review processes. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador appears to have circumvented most of these restrictions in the creation of the Mayan Train, raising many interesting ethical engineering questions.
Obviously, every decision has positive and negative consequences, especially large-scale ones that affect millions of people. Choosing where, when, and how to compromise or sacrifice is a difficult decision-making process, and it was interesting to see how different priorities impacted the execution of the Mayan Train. Important discussions, such as the consultations held by the Mexican government (however, there is room for improvement in the way they were managed), need to be carried out to find solutions that benefit the greatest number of stakeholders. The push for a better passenger rail network in the United States is growing, and there is a lot that engineers and government leaders could learn from our neighbors to the south, including things we should try to implement and things we should avoid.
Lessons for Future Projects
I hope to one day fly to the Yucatan Peninsula and experience the entire Mayan Train for myself. As someone who enjoys traveling, the tourist inside of me gets very excited thinking about the new possibilities the project could bring. However, especially now that I better understand what was sacrificed to build the Mayan Train, any future experience with this transit network would definitely be accompanied by a greater sense of appreciation for the land and the people themselves.
I hope to take the good and bad lessons from this project in my future career and strive to keep sustainability, equity, and preservation at the forefront of my intentions and decisions. There is much more to planning, building and operating transportation than just the modes of transportation themselves: there are lives impacted, real people with families, communities, stories and dreams. Working to optimize sustainable practices in all areas will ensure future projects stay on track. Whether or not the Mayan Train was built on the right path will have to be determined over time, but it is fascinating to discover what has been done so far and where it can go.
The Mayan Train: Tsíimin K’áak StoryMap
Scroll through the StoryMap below or click here to view it full screen in a new tab!
¡Haz clic aquí para verlo en español en pantalla completa en una nueva pestaña!