In a bold, unprecedented experiment for sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar’s capital Antananarivo embarked on an ambitious plan to beat crippling urban gridlock: a purpose-built cable car system designed to lift thousands of daily commuters over the city’s notorious traffic jams. Today, the empty cable lines stretch unused across the Antananarivo skyline, leaving what is widely seen as a $170 million misstep for one of the world’s poorest nations.
The project was the flagship infrastructure initiative of former Madagascan President Andry Rajoelina, who inaugurated the system ahead of his ousting in a military-led coup late last year. Rajoelina rose to power amid widespread youth-led protests that accused his administration of systemic failure across core public services, and he was removed from office shortly after the cable car’s launch.
Rajoelina had framed the cable car as the only viable solution to Antananarivo’s growing transit crisis. The capital, originally designed to house just 300,000 residents, now is home to more than 3 million people, a surge driven by rapid rural-to-urban migration. For decades, the city has relied on aging, severely overcrowded minibus taxis, which create multi-hour traffic snarls that disrupt daily life for commuters. Light rail, Rajoelina argued, was unworkable due to the region’s widespread marshy terrain, calling the cable car system a transformative project on par with France’s iconic Eiffel Tower at its 2024 unveiling.
Planners projected the system would carry up to 75,000 commuters daily, remove 2,000 private cars from city roads, and cut one-way commutes that often stretched to three hours down to just 10 to 30 minutes, depending on a rider’s route. But after the fanfare of the opening, when Rajoelina and his cabinet took the first ceremonial ride over the city’s steep hills and tightly packed informal neighborhoods, very few ordinary Madagascans stepped on board.
Built over three years with nearly $173 million in French development loans, the cable car project failed at its first hurdle: affordability for local residents. Project officials set a per-trip fare between 70 and 90 U.S. cents – six to eight times the cost of a ride on a traditional minibus. For most Antananarivo residents, that price point is insurmountable: a 2022 World Bank report puts the average monthly commuter salary in Madagascar at just $72, with roughly 75% of the country’s 30 million total residents living below the poverty line.
Pieter Onderwater, a public transport planning consultant and guest lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s Center for Transport Studies, explained that both the Madagascan government and the French development consortium behind the project overlooked a critical reality for low-income communities across the continent: cost prioritizes far over convenience for most people.
“Obviously people will not use it because money is far more key than time,” Onderwater noted. “The price is six times higher than a conventional minibus taxi? Well then, we just sit in traffic because we know better things to do with that money.”
Beyond the issue of cost, the project sparked widespread public anger from residents who have long struggled with a lack of basic core services, including reliable running water and consistent electricity. Many questioned why the government poured hundreds of millions into a luxury transit project instead of addressing these unmet fundamental needs first.
Residents also raised widespread safety concerns, particularly around the capital’s frequent power outages that already forced the cable car to stop operating repeatedly during its short trial run. “In a city where they cannot even fix the roads, how can we trust being more than 65 feet above the ground when there is a power cut?” asked Erica, a local shop owner who shared only her first name. “And if something goes wrong, how long would it take them to fix it?”
Tensions boiled over during the coup that removed Rajoelina from power, when demonstrators angry at the administration’s disconnect from public needs burned and damaged multiple cable car stations across the city. Since the coup, a transitional government led by former army colonel Michael Randrianirina has taken control of the country, but officials have not released any public plans for the abandoned cable car system. The transitional government did not respond to repeated requests for comment from the Associated Press.
A French firm part of the construction consortium confirmed that the partnership completed an inspection of the idle system in March and submitted its findings to Madagascan authorities, leaving the government to “decide on the next steps.”
The failure of the Antananarivo cable car project underscores a broader challenge facing the African continent as rapid urbanization outpaces infrastructure development. Antananarivo’s population has grown more than tenfold since the 1960s, mirroring a regional trend: the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development projects Africa’s total urban population will double from its current 700 million to 1.4 billion by 2050, creating massive unmet demand for public transit, housing, healthcare, education, water, and electricity.
Despite having some of the fastest urbanization rates globally, Africa also has some of the world’s least developed formal public transport systems, according to research institution Transport Africa. Onderwater explained that most African governments have largely left transit development to the private sector, which has organically built the widespread network of affordable private minibus taxis – known as kombis in South Africa, matatus in Kenya, and danfo in Nigeria – that carry the vast majority of working commuters across the continent.
While some Antananarivo commuters say they are intrigued by the idea of skipping over daily traffic jams, most have been grounded by practical concerns over cost, reliability, safety during severe seasonal storms and cyclones, and poor route planning. Hery Ratsimbazafy, a local office worker, summed up a common critique: the cable car lines do not even reach the city’s central business district, leaving it unable to serve the daily commute needs of most workers. “It doesn’t help me get where I need to go,” he said.