Lisa Schweitzer continues her hermeneutic investigation of my CityLab post: How to Make Public Transit Sustainable Once and For All, this time focusing on capital cost recovery and land use issues.

What Levinson is trying to get at here simply concerns the “eyes bigger than market” problem that plenty of cities get into over things like stadium deals. If you actually live in a world where land taxes aren’t distorted (which I don’t, so there’s that), letting utilities buy and develop around train stations makes abundant sense. Here’s the part of the equation that I think really matters: if you require local jurisdictions to provide a portion of the capital and operating subsidies for service, they then have every incentive (instead of the incentive they have now), to alter their local zoning and approvals process ahead of timeso that development around station areas can actually occur.

She thinks she has spotted an inconsistency (or mic drop), but I am not clear what it is. (I think she means my moving from voters have the right to subsidize stuff they want vs. jurisdictions should only do something that pencils out).

There is a qualitative difference between capital and operating, between rail and bus (though that’s not the important one), between stocks and flows, and between new and old.

Capital investments are new stocks while operating expenditures are continuing flows. From a public policy perspective, continuing with existing commitments (which may be an implied social contract) may be more important than making investments that bring about new commitments. Thus new commitments (such as new rail lines which have irreversibly embedded immobile capital) should only be undertaken if we believe at the outset (admittedly a forecast, which have problems) that they have cost recovery.

It is one thing to run a bus with some small subsidy for some indeterminate period of time.  That decision is reversible if it doesn’t work out. It is another to build a large capital investment with no prospect of cost recovery for a long period of time. The bus, being mobile capital, can always be rerouted, or reallocated to another service.

The large right-of-way (usually rail, but also a BRT right-of-way) cannot – and in a world with bond financing rather than pay-as-you-go infrastructure, imposes involuntary costs (capital repayment) obligations on future generations. This appeals to rail fans as a sign of “commitment” (ignoring the streetcars went away), but it is an inflexibility and unadaptability that means the “burden of proof” for making such a decision is higher.

I agree that requiring locals pay for their infrastructure might induce them to have socially better land use controls, since they may need the revenue that the higher accessibility may have created with more intense development to support the infrastructure that created the higher accessibility in the first place.