Yes, but public transit does create value - the question is who captures it.

BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services - house prices and rents would have increased substantially. Public investment, private profits. Subsidies in the form of low-cost fares like this are just further welfare for the landowners.

Interestingly, about a third of BART's cost was acquiring land - if/when that same land is cleared and sold on market, the project would have operated at an enormous profit. Certainly, BART's current assets would far exceed 'total fares collected'.

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wallst07 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>BART likely created huge profits for people who owned land in the areas it services

Unless you try to build housing.

https://reason.com/2018/02/21/san-francisco-man-has-spent-4-...

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xnx 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> public transit does create value - the question is who captures it.

Overpaid transit employees, engineering firms, and construction companies.

	▲	Schiendelman 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's a minuscule amount of the value it creates. And that's a problem, and a problem we can only fix by privatizing it. But most of the value it creates is for the landowners around it. And that's why successful transit companies are also real estate developers. Even in our own history, that's how private transit worked before we killed it.