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Comment by klipt | Hacker News Reader

Public transit is almost always unprofitable without some way of capturing the increased land value near the stations.

Supposedly some subways (eg Hong Kong?) own the land near the stations and use the rents to fund the subway, rather than just using fares.

A land value tax that goes back into public transit would probably work too.

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That's how it works in Japan. All the major train companies own the land around the major train stations and that's why you see all these department stores named after a train company.

Here's one, just follow the links to the group companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyu_Department_Store

Yup, if you’ve spent time in Japan, you can see how stores, hotels and attractions are laid out to drive train passenger traffic.

The same was true for streetcars in the USA, many streetcar companies built amusement parks in the countryside at the end of their lines to encourage weekend trips.

Regular property tax works fine. Montreal recaptures the increase as values rise through transfer taxes and ocassional reassesments.

Unfortunately California doesn't have regular property tax thanks to Prop 13: even if values rise, taxes don't.

So high speed rail in California is always going to be a boondoggle.

Transfer taxes are avoided by the wealthy. See London and NYC. An LLC purchased property. From that point the LLC is bought/sold/merged and the assets never change ownership

Maybe that ought to be fixed as well.

I was told that Hong Kong metro makes more from real estate rental than ticket sales.

And just look at what we put next to our Bart stations: giant parking structures. Sigh.

Supposedly the Hong Kong metro is already profitable just via fares.

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