All Aboard the “Fancy Gambling Train”! (Or Not)

Somehow $8 billion in funding for high-speed rail dropped like mana from heaven into the stimulus bill this week. Transportation nerds were agog and overjoyed. Then came the “news” today that it was all going to go to pay for, as a PAC headed up by Jim DeMint (R, S.C.) described it, a “Fancy Gambling Train” running from Hollywood (and DisneyLand) to Las Vegas.

This narrative had the virtue of being quite amusing and the vice of being total horseshit. The still theoretical Vegas train project might or might not get any funding, and almost certainly wouldn’t get a large part of it–as, say, the California High Speed Rail project might, or the midwestern equivalent.

“It’s not even a designated high speed rail corridor,” an expert at one of those high-falutin’ DC think tanks tells us. (But, then again, that might not actually prevent funding because “high-speed rail” is a loosey-goosey term.)

The question remains though: Where did the money come from? Was it Reid who put it in there so he could accomplish his nefarious plan of spending hard-earned taxpayer money to allow liberal moneybags like David Geffen and Barbara Streisand to a have plush and politically correct way to take weekenders at the Bellagio?

A source is telling us that it was actually one of Obama’s people who demanded its inclusion. (An administration official you’ve definitely heard of.) The idea was that HSR is analogous to the smart grid – symbolic of bold and ambitious and transformative infrastructure spending. It’s a variety of symbolism that Obama apparently demanded be more present in the bill.

On a practical level there is the problem that, in a rational world, stimulus spending priorities would go in this order:

1. Shoring up financially shakey transit authorities so that current employees aren’t losing their jobs and poor people aren’t losing service;
2. Spending on shovel-ready local transit projects;
3. Spending on new intercity and HSR projects that are still in early planning stages;

In practice, this has been stood on it’s head — struggling transit agencies are getting no stabilization funds and HSR is getting more money than anyone could have predicted. But the whole ambition thing is nice too.