A recently published essay on Zócalo Public Square makes its argument in the headline: Morocco has high-speed rail, and California has excuses.

The framing is blunt, and it is deliberate. The author draws a comparison between a country that completed a high-speed railway and an American state that has spent years — and large sums of public money — trying to build one, without putting a single high-speed train into passenger service.

The core of the piece is the gap between delivery and delay. On one side stands Morocco, which built and operates an Al Boraq-service line connecting its commercial capital, Casablanca, with Tangier in the north. On the other stands the California High-Speed Rail programme, launched more than a decade ago with the promise of linking Los Angeles and San Francisco, which has yet to open a single segment for revenue service.

The essay treats that contrast as a question worth sitting with. If a middle-income country with a smaller economy can plan, finance, construct and launch a dedicated high-speed line, why has one of the wealthiest states in the wealthiest country on earth struggled to do the same?

The answer the title points to — "excuses" — signals where the author lays the blame. The piece belongs to a familiar genre of infrastructure commentary: the international comparison intended to embarrass domestic institutions into self-examination. In this case, the comparison is between a delivered asset and an undelivered one.

Morocco's line, operated with dedicated trainsets and running over a corridor that includes new-build sections, has become a frequent reference point in these debates. It is often cited not because Morocco's conditions match California's, but because the project was finished. The trains run. Timetables exist. Passengers ride.

California's programme, by contrast, has been defined by shifting scope, extended timelines and repeated revisions to cost and schedule expectations. What began as a vision of connecting the state's two largest metropolitan areas has narrowed, in practice, to a effort to complete a usable segment in the Central Valley. Each recalibration has invited the question the essay poses: what, exactly, is taking so long?

The Zócalo piece does not pretend the comparison is apples-to-apples. Countries differ in land-acquisition law, environmental review, labour costs, governance and political structure. But the essay's thrust is that these differences explain delays without justifying them — and that at some point, explanations harden into excuses.

For rail-industry observers, the piece lands in the middle of an ongoing argument about American passenger-rail delivery. The United States has few examples of recently built, true high-speed lines, and the projects it has attempted have tended to overrun budgets and timelines by wide margins. Commentators have pointed to systems in Europe, East Asia and, increasingly, North Africa as evidence that the obstacles are not primarily technical.

Whether Morocco's experience transfers to California is debatable. That Morocco has a working high-speed railway, and that California does not, is not. The essay's contribution is to insist that readers hold both facts in view at once — and to ask which set of institutional habits produced which outcome.

The piece closes an uncomfortable loop for California planners: every year without revenue service strengthens the argument its critics have already made.

Readers can find the full essay, "Morocco Has High-Speed Rail. California Has Excuses," at Zócalo Public Square.