Since I was complaining earlier I might as well at least TRY to talk about transit solutions...
Japanese transit providers know the answer to this--public transit is a *real estate venture* before anything else.
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You need space for your stops, you need space for transfer facilities, and you need dedicated ROW if your frequency gets high enough.
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One more thought on transit solutions--public transit networks are fractals; you use different networks depending on your scale of travel.
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If any part of the fractal is missing or underdeveloped, all the rest of it suffers. This is a big problem in the USA.
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The top level of the public transit fractal is air travel. We manage this pretty well, no issues here.
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Below air travel, though, is a huge "missing middle;" several tiers of transportation are neglected or completely absent.
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Local bus travel is the bottom level of the public transit fractal, and here the USA at least makes an effort.
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But local transit isn't much use if it doesn't feed into regional transit, etc, all the way up to global transit. Every level counts.
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...wait, what? The Japanese providers have rail-real estate syncretism, which isn't the same as "real estate before anything else."
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my point is that these companies would be viable if they were only in real estate, but not viable if they were only in rail
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I don't think that's true. For nearly all private railroads, both divisions are profitable, though real estate has higher margins.
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no, not the profitability--what I mean is they *need* ownership of their own land (at minimum) to do justice to their rail
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if they were renting their stations, etc, from other landowners they'd be screwed
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Well, if we're talking about station facilities, then every subway in the world owns real estate.
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ya but subways are hardly the only kind of transit out there, you know?
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Very different from the transportation-real estate synergy that exists in Japan and Hong Kong.
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