Eric Jaffe, reporting for the Atlantic Cities:
“Somewhere along the journey we split land values away from the railway operation, and the railway operation just became a railway operation, and they lost their property arm,” he said. “When you look at cities like Hong Kong, what they’ve done with their metro system, it’s fundamentally a property company. They built a metro system on the side. It’s there to increase values. We have to return to that. I think that’s what we’ve lost. That connectivity between the two things.”
Or like JR Rail in Japan, which owns plenty of real estate around its stations. Look how profitable they are.