All aboard high-speed politics

FRESH OFF HIS State of the Union address, President Obama flew to Tampa to announce $1.25 billion in economic recovery funds to go toward a high-speed rail corridor between that city and Orlando. It's part of an $8 billion investment from the economic recovery package announced in April. We're in favor of these kinds of projects. They would get people out of their cars and thus reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But a better investment would have been to use all of that money to make the Northeast Corridor -- the nation's most traveled rail line -- a model for high-speed rail.

Thirty high-speed rail projects received stimulus funding, spanning 31 states in every region of the country. Many of them have been on state transportation drawing boards for years. They include high-speed rail between San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco ($2.34 billion), Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City ($1.13 billion) and Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Chicago ($823 million). Meanwhile, the Northeast Corridor, from Boston to Washington, D.C., will be targeted for $112 million in recovery money to help fund improvements along the route.

These federal dollars are meant to be seed money to spur local and private investment. They also have the benefit of putting people to work. But these projects are massive, take years to build and cost tens of billions of dollars. That's why sprinkling limited funds across the country strikes us as an inefficient exercise, one that is ripe for pork-barrel politics.

Take, for instance, the pet project of Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), a rail connection between Las Vegas and Los Angeles. While it did not get any recovery funds, we won't be surprised if it snags some of the additional $5 billion over the next five years that Mr. Obama announced last year to help jump-start high-speed rail plans.

Amtrak's Acela, which runs between Boston, New York and Washington, is the only high-speed train in the United States. While it can reach a top speed of 135 mph on the Washington-to-New York run, the average speed on that route is 83 mph -- not nearly fast enough.

A serious plan to get high-speed rail service up and running would have used the Acela as a test case by making improvements to the existing infrastructure. Japan, France and Italy all boast trains that can reach speeds of more than 200 mph. The United States won't be joining the club anytime soon.