Tag: transit funding

People are willing to pay more than fares for transit

This is really nothing new, except that it is a new data about an old truth:

from the Econsult report
from the Econsult report

Analysis of Philadelphia suburban data shows that people are willing to pay more than fares for rail transit, as indicated by house prices in areas near the stations. These are really land prices since characteristics of the houses are already filtered out. Interesting to see that people living more than a half-mile from the station seem willing to pay more for frequent service than for extensive parking, but I wouldn’t want to conclude too much from this limited analysis.  The study considers only parking and frequency of service, nothing about travel time, availability of feeder bus, or anything else, but the main point remains.  See the full report here.

Real estate can help pay for transit

Haven’t posted much lately; busy with other things, including trying to clear off my desk.  In the process of which I found some notes of interest

How do you fund transit in the “most liveable city in the world?” Vancouver uses the real estate tax to cover about 35% of its operating shortfall (net of fares).  Fuel tax covers an almost equal amount (See this pdf). One can imagine how well Chicago’s transit system could run if funded this way, assuming also that it was competently planned and managed.

Unfortunately, Vancouver fails to fund capital costs in this way, relying instead on what Canadians call “senior governments,” meaning provincial and federal funds.  Probably that has something to do with the continuing real estate bubble in the area.

I also found notes I took at a conference in July concerning Japanese high speed rail services.  Japan is said to be the only country with privately-owned high speed passenger rail.  How is it funded? Hint: JR-East, one of the big operators of high speed trains, gets 32% of its gross revenue (see this pdf) from real estate it owns, and intends to grow this to 40 by collecting more of the value that good transport gives to real estate.