[sustran] Re: Transportation investments and real estate values

[Roberto Verzola]

 >The Light Rail Transit new lines in Kuala Lumpur are 
 >partly financed I understand by allowing the private 
 >companies developing the lines also to develop shopping 
 >centres at selected stations and recoup their costs 
 >through rental of the shops. The same principles are 
 >used in many BOT type contracts in Asia.

We in the Philippines have a very bad experience about this approach.
The government took precisely this approach with our Light Rail
Transit III, and the private consortium doing the project made very
pedestrian-unfriendly decisions with no public consultations or
hearings, based on purely commercial considerations. The
loading/unloading stations are essentially malls. Some of them were
located *mid-way* between major highway crossings, requiring
pedestrians to walk very long distances (500m. or more) as they shift
from one mode to another. Our LRT III is less a system for bringing
the public to their home and workplaces, but more a system for moving
shoppers from one mall to another, using public land freely given to
private developers by the government.

Roberto Verzola