On Sat, 22 May 2010 18:15:11 +0100, Tom Anderson
wrote:

On Sat, 22 May 2010, Bruce wrote:

But today, we have the situation where railways are extremely costly to
build and never generate any profit. Instead, they require very large
subsidies for construction *and* operation. So if developers of office
space in the Isle of Dogs and of housing in areas that might serve those
offices want to make vast profits on their property developments, it
should not be made on the back of taxpayers.

What happened to this land value tax that was floated when Crossrail was
being planned? The idea was something like a special levy of any gain in
value of property around Crossrail stations. I assume there'd be a
mechanism for discounting out some estimate of any increase that would
have happened anyway or something. That always seemed like a rather fair
way of doing it.


I agree, it did seem fair. But I think it was dropped in favour of
using whatever methods of persuasion were available to elicit
voluntary contributions from developers. That hasn't been terribly
successful.