Same thing in many other places - in Kyoto there is big and nicely build station by JR and, Transport Tycon style 200 meters from it another big station by IIRC Kintetsu.

Or in the middle of Tokyo, the Minami Senju station is effectively three station - One on the JR Joban line, one on Tokyo Metro and deep bellow another one on the Tsukuba express line.

So its definitelydoable, even in the most densely populated of places, at least with rail.

Also when you compare with places that have little to no competitionon the rail network you can clearly see the lack of service quality resulting from that. Well, if you get any service at all. :P

Land owners whose land is taken away are given new plots of land that are smaller, but closer to stations. These smaller plots are worth more than the original land because they are now near (future) train stations.

[0] http://www.wctrs-society.com/wp-content/uploads/abstracts/ri...

BTW, that's something else I noticed in Japan - train stations are almost always hubs of commercial and often also cultural activity - there are shops, hotels, good restaurants and often also galleries, event spaces, monuments and even the buildings themselves are often architectonic masterpieces (for example JR Kyoto station, just check it out!). This definitely helps with passenger numbers and keeps the whole thing sustainable not to mention profitable.

In comparison Czech & Slovak railway stations (Prague, Brno, Bratislava) are often run down, dirty, fregvented by questionable people who aren't going to ride the trains and any shops or food places are cheap low quality ones. As a result one tries to spend as little as possible on these train station, let alone spend there any money for the few sub-par amenities available.

It's really strange why it is like this, given the missed commercial opportunities, seems to be much better in other european countries (Vienna, Eindhoven, etc.).

I would actually consider this an odd example of "long-range" transport.

The second avenue subway was the most expensive subway in the world on a per mile basis. Considerably more expensive than Paris or Tokyo

> The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world

Similarly, the fare only covers around 50% of the operating costs which hardly seems fair for NY state taxpayers that pick up the expense despite receiving no benefit.

The competing services for infra in NYC are cabs, car pools, private buses, bike rentals, scooters, subways. For getting into/out of the city, you have a number of bridges. For instance, I can take Lincoln tunnel, Holland Tunnel or ferry. It would be great to have more options and obviously its not easy to build tunnels, but private ferry and water cab services could be expanded

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-14/what-s-a-...

Why should a relatively poor upstate new york taxpayer be paying 50% of the fare of some young finance bro going to work?

Also removing prices removes information. For instance the ferry costs something like $15 per rider to operate compared to around $5 for subway. With both trips at the same price to the consumer, you make the marginal rider indifferent to the two in terms of price where it would be beneficial to have that information to save money and divert resources to the more effective mode

> roads to places I'll never go

Gasoline tax and toll roads are a good way of linking those who benefit to those who provide the good.

> schools my child doesn't attend

A lot of people move out of high tax neighborhoods when their kids graduate high school. I don't think school should be tied to real-estate anyway because it creates really perverse dynamics (people without money end up going to the worse funded schools). So that model doesn't exactly work well right now

> medical procedures that I don't need

I buy health insurance voluntarily and gladly pay for medical procedures that I don't need on the off chance that I need an expensive medical procedure in the future

Or to look at it another way: assume some genie offered to dismantle the NYC train/subway system for free. Assume you're the government and only care about maximizing revenue. Would that be a good deal? Of course not, even if the system wasn't self-sustaining from fares.

> The competing services for infra in NYC are cabs, car pools, private buses, bike rentals, scooters, subways.

You're conflating the infrastructure with the service on top of it. The equal comparison would be railroad project to motorcar roads & bridges. And the latter also have their share of cost overrun stories...

(Also, bridges are the rare case where a ship can compete. But, well, every rule has its exceptions.)

Oh and the fact that it's (even unreasonably) expensive has no bearing at all on the argument. There ain't gonna be some competitor building their own railway line regardless, or especially since the first one was so expensive.

Even here though, there is a coordination problem to ensure various companies remain mutually compatible.

Then again, I don't think it's viable to build subway tracks and tunnels to compete. Even if you have space under the earth, there may not be space for more stations, and good station locations are important too.

It's yet another monopoly problem even though it doesn't look like it at first glance. Each house basically sits on a piece of mlonopoly for the parcel below it, preventing others from use.

It's not much of a big deal in general, but in congested big cities, it is a problem. It's the cause of high rents (by Ricardo's law od rent).

The solution is also a kind of monopoly tax - land value tax (LVT). You pay yearly percentage of the market value. Achieving almost optimal allocation instead of current hereditary one.

Establishing "market value" is the rub. Texas for example, does not make real estate sales prices public. This has a lot of perverse effects, one of which is deep-pocketed commercial interests have pummeled public assessors until commercial property is tacitly way undervalued for tax purposes, yet is openly sold for much more than the purported tax basis.

I've heard of a system I found interesting (but alas, can no longer find a reference to link) to competitively establish tax basis on commercial real estate (I wouldn't want this on natural person owner-occupied residential). You claim whatever tax basis you want. It gets published in the open. Whoever can put up completely unencumbered cash over the barrel for that basis + 7% or more though, can purchase the property. And by unencumbered, I mean not even investor syndication. Real, natural person, outright first and only lien on the cash, absolutely no liens tolerated against the property tied directly or indirectly to the cash.

Cash goes into government-controlled escrow. Current owner has one year to pay difference on one year's worth of new imputed tax basis represented by the escrowed cash, and continue from that point forward with the new basis. If the owner comes up with it, the bidder loses 6% of the cash (or whatever the real estate industry commission structure is at that time in that locality) to the local government as commission to facilitate the price discovery. Bidder can increase bid at any time by adding to escrow account, until either current owner "sells" to bidder (and escrow releases 100% to the current owner, no commission), or bidder walks.

I haven't sat down to really pencil it out, but I'm sure if someone did they'd find a way to game such a system, since I figured it otherwise would have been put into use.

There is one major consequence: investor/VC backed/mega-rich major chains would instantly drown out family owned and small businesses that can't compete with gentrification. This is already a plague with Walmart and Amazon absolutely flattening local economies, your proposal would make it an epidemic of yet-unimaginable scale.

Like I said, I found the entire idea of a competitive market in price discovery to establish tax basis fascinating, not the specific implementation details.

Land ownership is problematic because neighborhood improvements can be extracted via land ownership. The most effective policy against this extraction is to simply tax the land itself and thus turn it into a liability if the value of the land grows. Ideally, property taxes would be replaced with land value taxes.

If land is a liability the only reason why people would purchase it is to improve the value of the land and make it available for productive uses like renting it out to a large number of people.

If anything, this strengthens the argument. You can buy/rent/... a different parcel nearby, and this only affects you and your planned use of the building. But you can't switch to a different road network, and this affects everyone in their daily life.

That said, I also agree with the sibling post that this is also a problem, just of a different kind.

Oh no. Construction, operation and maintenance of electricity and other vital networks (water, gas, sewage, telecommunication) should be done by the government as a government agency with a quality of service mandate and not in form of a profit-oriented company no matter if government owned or private owned / publicly traded - because "competition" and/or a focus on costs is always going to end in price and wage dumping, cutting corners and sometimes in deathly disasters (California fires caused by cutting costs on maintenance, Flint water scandal, Texas infrastructure collaps due to un-hardened systems, ...).