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[quote user="Paul_D_North_Jr"] It might also be informative to review the articles by Prof. of Economics George W. Hilton.  Also, it's pretty well settled that many streetcar lines were built by land developers to facilitate access to - and hence to increase the value and selling price of - their new neighborhoods, suburbs, towns, and even amusement parks, etc. further out.  In economic terms, that is called "exploitation of the land", and is not a negative connotation.  As such, though, the streetcar lines were intended to be mere transportation tools to achieve a greater end, not as a 'profit-making center' of their own.   "LEINBERGER: Transportation, whether it be roads or rail transit, or bike lanes, have always been subsidized. . . . And I’m suggesting, and Locus is suggesting, and a lot of developers are suggesting that we need to learn from how we used to build our transit systems 100 years ago. This country 100 years ago had the finest rail transit system on the planet. And the vast majority of it was paid for by real estate developers, and it’s not as if the economics were different then than now – those rail transit systems, those trollies, those subways in New York, lost money. So why did developers build them? They built them to get their customers out to their land, so land profits subsidized the transit, and that’s what we’re proposing with value capture as well. Value capture is capturing the value that’s created by transportation improvements. And it’s not as if you can just assume that developers are just going to pay for it all, that’s not going to happen." - Paul North. [/quote] I think that economics were much different then from what they are now.   Now, transit is truly subsidized as public sector entity.  It seems like George Hilton and Christopher Leinberger are dancing on the head of a pin to reach a torturous conclusion that the trollies and interubans of a 100 years ago lost money and were subsidized because they were not a profit making center of their own, but rather, were a necessary component of a profit making venture.  If they were a necessary component of a profit making venture, then they too were a profit making part of that venture.  It is really a stretch to conclude that the profit of the profit center subsidized the non-profit nature of the transit system that was essential to make the profit making center work. To say that land profits subsidized the transit may be true in a sense of accounting for a particular business venture, but it is not analogous to the public sector subsidizing transit.
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