Sweden has decided its largest transport investment ever, around 100 billion kronor a year until 2037. Weeks later, the agency that has to deliver it stood on an Almedalen stage and said, in its own words, that it must change.
The week in Visby
On 29 April 2026, Trafikverket announced that it stands ready to carry out historic investments in transport infrastructure. The national plan for 2026–2037 comes with an economic frame of roughly 100 billion kronor per year, in the agency's own words one of the largest commitments ever made to Sweden's transport system. Director-general Roberto Maiorana set the tone: "Vi har förberett oss och är redo." We have prepared, and we are ready.
The government adopted the plan on 24 April. Two months later, on 25 June, Trafikverket's deputy director-general Francisca Ramsberg sat on a panel at Mälardalsrådet's Almedalen seminar and described what delivering it will actually take.
Vi måste ändra oss, stärka vår leveransförmåga och ha en bättre dialog.
She did not leave it at a slogan: "Vi har också tagit till oss att vi inte kan genomföra den nya transportplanen med befintligt arbetssätt." We have taken on board that we cannot carry out the new transport plan with our existing ways of working. It takes institutional courage to say that in public, two months after the money landed. The honest reading is not that Trafikverket is failing. It is that the agency is describing its constraint more plainly than anyone else has.
The industry
The rail industry held its own seminar the same week, when Swedtrain, FSJ, JBS and Tågföretagen presented Färdplan 2050 at Samhällsbyggararenan in Visby. The room was full. Swedtrain's recap of the discussion starts from the same premise: the will to deliver exists, "viljan att leverera finns", but delivery depends on political decisions that hold beyond a single election cycle, and on balancing extensive track works against traffic that has to keep running.
The industry site järnvägar.nu ran its Almedalen report under a headline that compresses the week into five words: "Ingen aktör fixar allt själv." No single actor fixes everything alone. On stage: infrastructure minister Andreas Carlson, Trafikverket's Roberto Maiorana, Green Cargo's Henrik Dahlin, clients and municipalities. Two rooms, one message. The money is decided. The will is documented. The open question is capacity.
The fix rate
What does fixing the skills shortage look like in practice? Trafikverket's HR director Henrik Dider gave the Mälardalsrådet panel a concrete number.
För tre år sedan tog ungefär 140 personer yrkesexamen inom BEST-yrkena och förra året var det 240.
BEST stands for bana, el, signal och teleteknik: the trades that build and maintain railways. Going from 140 to 240 graduates in three years is a 70 percent increase, and real progress that took real work. It is also a hundred additional people per year, set against a plan that will spend roughly 1,200 billion kronor over twelve years. Trafikverket's own plan proposal describes the skills situation as an acute question for the plan's delivery, and warns that the shortage can mean measures in the national plan cannot be carried out. Since the turn of the year, the government has given the agency a clearer mandate for the railway's skills supply.
The plan's maintenance promises are dated, and they assume the people arrive. Neglected road maintenance is to be dealt with by 2037; the groundwork is to be laid for catching up with rail maintenance by 2050. Recruitment and vocational education move at the pace above: dozens, then hundreds, per year. Nobody at either seminar disputed that arithmetic. They stated it.
The missing variable
Every capacity discussion in Almedalen reached for the same three levers: educate more people, recruit more broadly, prioritise harder between projects. All three are right, and all three are slow. A vocational programme delivers its increase over years. A civil engineering degree takes five. Prioritisation frees capacity in one place by removing it from another.
There is a fourth variable that rarely gets its own slide: how much each engineer gets through in a year. The volume of investigation, design and review behind every kilometre of track is document work, produced and checked by hand, and it is precisely the kind of work that machine assistance is now starting to compress. When Ramsberg says the agency cannot deliver the new plan with existing ways of working, this is the variable that new ways of working can actually move within a plan period rather than a generation. The plan is funded. The engineers the plan needs are not all there, and cannot all be there soon. But every engineer who is there can be given more throughput. That part does not take twelve years.
Sources
Yesper is the AI civil engineer for construction and infrastructure. AFRY, COWI, NRC Group and other Nordic firms use it to halve the time on a study, rerun calculations in minutes, and catch errors that would otherwise slip through. Get in touch if you'd like to see what it can do for you.
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