That France-Spain connection is fairly special. Firstly, international connections tend to have much less traffic than intranational ones. Secondly, the line wa

That France-Spain connection is fairly special. Firstly, international connections tend to have much less traffic than intranational ones. Secondly, the line was built with a PPP project (long since failed), assuming it could be very profitable based on track access fees - and the track access fees for that stretch of railroad are basically the highest anywhere in Europe except for the channel tunnel. But unlike the channel tunnel (and thirdly), the connections across the line aren’t as useful as the channel tunnel, which connects a giant metropolis (London) with several other metropoli in 2-4 hours, a sweet spot for rail, whereas Barcelona and Paris/Marseille are more like 6h. Once the French side will update their Mediterranean rail lines to hsr standards, the time will go down and ridership will increase, despite the high costs. Lastly, there isn’t much freight on the line, because (besides the high track fees) there isn’t much of a standard gauge freight rail network in Spain. In some sense the Perpignan Figueras line was supposed to be like the channel tunnel, but it really isn’t. It’s not exactly comparable to the rest of the Spanish hsr network - which is arguably overbuilt for political reasons to get hsr into many even smaller cities, and perhaps under-utilised at this point, but it’s not as bad as that one line might suggest when picked as a representative.