Wasnt there a simpsons episode about a similar boondoggle in the 90s?
Sort of. Springfield got some huge wad of tax windfall money from somewhere, and at the big town meeting to decide how to spend it (Mayor Quimby is so incompetent he can't even figure out how to blow money on his own) this shyster shows up and somehow convinces the town to build the monorail he's selling (over Marge's idea to use the money to repave the badly damaged streets of the town, and Lisa's questioning of why a small town with a centralized population needs a mass transit system). It turns out that it's a decades-old second-hand monorail from some amusement park or something like that after the controls fail and it accelerates uncontrollably (until Homer, the driver, saves the day with an improvised grapple line to the sign of a local donut shop, leading to the iconic line, "Donuts! Is there anything they can't do?").
This also illustrates (again) that Steph, for all his skill at dissecting news stories and real-world problems, is pants when it comes to examining fiction. You'd get deeper analysis out of a trite Ganddalf-is-Jesus paper.
