One Big Chinese Lesson for America’s Infrastructure Plan | Bloomberg

David Fickling at Bloomberg writes: One Big Chinese Lesson for America’s Infrastructure Plan It’s not just about laying down tracks for superfast trains. It’s about letting the public sector benefit from increasing land values.

My quotes:

Measures to levy fees on the local property owners, such as the special assessment zones used to finance projects like Seattle’s South Lake Union Streetcar, could in theory have a similar effect. The problem is that the unity of purpose needed to develop larger-scale infrastructure is lacking in the modern U.S., according to David Levinson, a professor of transport engineering at the University of Sydney and former transportation planner in Maryland.

“Transportation decisions are much more fractured” in the U.S., Levinson says. “Property taxes are a local government thing whereas transport infrastructure funding tends to be a state thing. Governments aren’t willing to upend the privileges of municipalities to get infrastructure built.”

That fragmentation also means that spending is too reactive — for instance, repeatedly widening roads to eliminate congestion rather than developing integrated visions for how cities as a whole could function better. “The traffic engineers have more power than the planners,” Levinson says, “and the decision makers drive a car, so they have the view from their windshield.”

Can Chinese infrastructure translate in the U.S.? Photographer: Billy H.C. Kwok/Bloomberg