Still thinking about the Amtrak NEC HSR proposal. As I said, it really is a trivial amount of money, the amount of one year in Afghanistan spread over 30 years. And after actually reading through some of the details from the actual proposal, it's clear that this isn't just about establishing HSR. It's recognizing that capacity needs to be increased, and there's plenty of maintenance which is going to have to happen anyway so that opportunity might as well leveraged.
Still on the simple question of "if I had $100 billion to spend on transit projects," with an eye to the projects themselves along with good economic stimulus, I'd actually favor funding 1) current intra-city transit projects that are slowing down because of lack of funds and 2) improved inter-city rail corridors elsewhere. Rail in the Northeast is pretty good! And improving it in plenty of places elsewhere is actually pretty cheap.
