jamesinclair wrote:
Even if theyre offering free parking on private property, it can be taxed. Im thinking of the recent DC tax on paper and plastic bags - stores arent allowed to eat the cost, the 5 cent fee must be presented to the customers because part of the reason the tax exists is to lower use of bags (the second reason is to raise money for river cleanup).
I dont think adding a fee would discourage patronage as long as the fee is applied to all casinos in the region. Nobody will say "screw paying $1 to park in vegas, Im going to reno". However, it will help in the calculations individuals may make to see if it's more cost effective to drive or to take the train to vegas. Instead of parking being free, now that's $5-$10 for the trip, which may be more than using the local bus transit.
Train service and local transit must go hand in hand. I think it is in the best interest for the state of nevada (and the casinos) to have more tourists arrive without cars. As long as the casinos and the city continue to go out of their way to encourage car use by tourists, the train will suffer.
Considering the general downturn in casino gaming due to the overcapacity in the industry as a whole, and the collapse of employment in Las Vegas in particular, even a minimal parking tax would serve to drive away business. After all, Las Vegas faces more competition than ever before, both within the state and from various Native American and other out-of-state casinos. Do anything to discourage visitors, and you'd further exacerbate an already dismal employment picture. Does anyone want to go to Vegas, spending hundreds, if not thousand per day on food, lodging, gambling, just to be "encouraged" to ride a dirty transit bus, or schlep to the inconvenient, failed monorail? Is that any way to attract big spending, high rollers? If you attempt to force people to use public transit in a city that was built around the automobile, they will drive elsewhere. There are plenty of places to gamble. Even a token parking fee might have catastrophic consequences, costing Vegas more revenue than it would collect.
In the end, it would be far better to liquidate the Las Vegas Monorail, which is an utterly useless conveyance, than to prop it up with any form of public support. Of course, the same is true of the publicly supported, little used "people movers" in Jacksonville and Detroit, both of which should have been shut down years ago.
The DesertXpress represents a proposal without any real merit, which would be fine and good if it was based solely on private funding. I'd be more than glad to see private investors and foreign suppliers lose money on a train line to nowhere, but the real problem with DesertXpress is that it's serving as an ideological deterrent to restoring Amtrak service to Las Vegas. The simple truth is that there is a real market for a daily, daylight train between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Truth be known, even a tri-weekly Salt Lake City-Las Vegas-Los Angeles train in the form of a revived Desert Wind would be preferable to a laughable HSR line that terminates in the-middle-of-nowhere.
I'm not going to touch the issue of a plastic bag tax in Washington D.C., a city that has the most inept elected governement in the United States. Yes, you can tax most anything, but in a place where poverty and crime are rampant, plastic shopping bags are only a minor annoyance.
