All long-distance transport construction requires "confiscating" land. Somehow it's completely routine to take huge swathes of land for freeway widening, but build one little train line and everyone loses their minds.
The railway is a common good, and the housing development profits are just a means to those ends.
It isnt about sustainability, it is about who pays, and the public not wanting to pay for something you use isnt a good enough reason size private property from a small number of individuals.
By that logic, we could do away with taxes entirely if the state simply confiscated everything it needed form select individuals.
using eminent domain to get land for a shop attached to a train station isn't a slippery slope to the cops coming in and confiscating your car just because they want it.
Taxes and fares aren't enough to run a transportation system properly because of politics and culture.
I hate when people seem to justify handing private land to private developers to build a shopping mall for profit but get the vapors when it’s the public wanting to build a subway. Same as the conservatives who did bush v gore and then get the vapors when the other side wants its calvinball relief when the circumstances justify it.
The slippery slope is real and once you open the bloodgates to private interests you really ought to open it to others as well. Like draw me a coherent line as to why a developer sucking up land via eminent domain should be legally allowed but the public building a train is not. If you want to argue the former should be rolled back then fine but that’s a thing that will ruffle numerous feathers, and in the meantime we have a public who’s tapping their watch waiting for the train.
Abstract disagreement with the legislative and legal realities doesn’t make the existence of eminent domain for speculation or the calvinball court ruling any less of a concrete power. This is a thing we do, and if you want to campaign to end eminent domain then fine but right now the law says we can eminent domain it, develop it, and sell it.
>Like draw me a coherent line as to why a developer sucking up land via eminent domain should be legally allowed but the public building a train is not
My whole point is that building a train is a legitimate use (IMO), but taking the adjacent land just to sell to developers make the state money is not.
Source: South Pasadena is my home town and I left shortly after Caltrans officially gave up. The year after Caltrans dropped the project altogether, a massive chunk of the city's budget was reallocated back to the schools and roads which made a huge difference to the infrastructure.
The issue wasn't that they tried to put the freeway where someone didn't want it because nobody wants a freeway nextdoor, the issue is they tried to force it upon people who could fight back.
Pretty much. The history of US highway construction is full of politicians using freeways to bulldoze and split poor communities. That's how the euphemism "urban renewal" got its name.
Did that actually stop its construction? No. The state government ended up building the eastern section anyway, starting in 2019, and it opened in 2023. But the surface reservation had been lost, and reacquiring it through eminent domain would have been prohibitively expensive due to high property prices, and politically too controversial too, so it had to go through a tunnel. A surface freeway would have cost AU$1–3 billion, with underground tunnelling the cost was well over AU$15 billion (around US$10 billion)
Wran's 1977 decision to sell the freeway land reservation was arguably one of the most expensive decisions ever made in Australian history. In the long-run it had made life worse for local residents, as the freeway dumped commuter traffic 15 km short of its primary destination, and they had to put up with that traffic traversing their local roads–which made the eventual completion of the freeway almost inevitable
Technically private property, but also already shared, public space.