A new video responding to New York City Mayor Mamdani’s proposal to institute an open-ended commitment to create free buses, which the Metropolitan Transit Authority says will cost a billion dollars a year, has suggested subway expansion would be a much better choice: https://youtu.be/ovI1DKyOD3s?si=Vg3emKIaff_TPqTh.
A definite Yes to the suggestion of paying for NYC subway expansion with a value capture fee – aka Land Value Tax – but for a specific region near subway stations. This is how most countries are able to afford mass transit; some countries, like dense Singapore actually allow transit authorities to own land along the subway routes and collect rent to pay for the expansions.
Done properly in dense neighborhoods, this can result in zero cost over time, after collecting the fees for a few years to decades at most. For more details on that, see Fred Harrison’s book “Wheels of Fortune.”
We should do the same to pay for the ferries too, where it’s so obvious that the buildup of the western Queens-Brooklyn shoreline exactly corresponds to distance from new ferry terminals.
As Georgists, we should always be on the lookout for sectors of the economy and infrastructure where tailored value capture can be used to demonstrate the power of Land Value Taxation – though no one likes to call it a “tax” anymore – to prove transformative change is still possible.