Value capture next best thing

David Levinson is a big fan of value capture and always good for a blog post reference every month. Well, the Transportationist has done it again in a recent blog post:

Ideally transit would be paid for by user fees. But given roads are not, this would result in there being very little transit, since fares would be very high, and users driven away. Still, these could be higher.

So if you can’t use user fees, what’s the next best solution? Land value capture. This is nowhere to be seen. Why not? Concentrated losses for concentrated benefits.

He goes on to talk about several other mechanisms. Before finishing his post, I had to think back a second about why user fees might be better than value capture. Why would that be?

User fees reflect the beneficiaries pays principle of taxation. So do many value capture mechanisms. User fees are proportional to benefits. So too are (or can be) value capture mechanisms. They sound like equals.

But Levinson points out that value capture has concentrated loses (I think he means "impacts" on payees) with