If we say "there's not enough rail", Georgists will say "ahah ! Apply LVT and you will have enough money to afford decent rail".

But, for land-use transport advocates (LUTAs), its not that simple. In our view, there is enough money around to build decent rail and public transport, its just that it is directed towards roads and private vehicle use.

This is a very different emphasis. Geonomists would say "you just need more money. LVT gives you that". LUTAs say "its a matter of setting priorities - and that's quite separate to LVT".

Sure, it might be _easier_ to fund rail expansion with more money, but its also possible that excessive roads will be built as well, resulting in worse outcomes.

It is related to the claim that Geonomics underlies _everything_, particularly land related issues. This is an area where Geonomics is just too simplistic. It looks at just one part of a bigger picture.

What are we to become more worked up about ? A lack of money, or wrong priorities with money we currently spend ? Geonomics puts its head on the sand on this one. There's the vague "there'll be a lot more money to go around, so fewer political conflicts, and therefore an improvement". This seems overly optimistic.

Let us consider "sprawl", a family descriptor of a lot of problems with cities at present.

Sprawl includes : cities being spread out, high level of pollution, high energy consumption, excessive road travel and associated accidents, a deterioration in public spaces, high transport costs in outer suburbs, the need to travel from far flung suburbs to areas nearer the city centre with a concentration of jobs and isolation and loneliness for those trapped in declining suburbs.

What do we mean by "excessive" ? Well, The cities Phoenix, Sydney and Munich have annual petrol consumption of 70, 25 and 11 Gigajoules per person respectively. They have respectively 10, 18 and 70 people per hectare.

Problems with the urban form resulting in sprawl relate to the decisions about infrastructure construction : whether it is private car based or public transport based, and what the charging schemes are for fuel and travel. There is presently an effective subsidy to road transport.

A city which performs the same amount of activity, be that people living a life or economic activity, with reduced energy consumption and car use will be less polluted. In this case, we will have a more positive, more livable city.

There are two issues : first, there should be efficient transport moving people around, this being public transport rather than private vehicles. Second, there should be a greater density of people so that more people are already closer to somewhere they might like to go.

Rail links and stations are nucleation centres which prompt the development of units. Close to a station, units are sought after rather than being thought of as "impersonal boxes" as they would be elsewhere. Units are the sort of development which is beneficial for the city overall.

Georgism seems to take the increase in land value resulting from the community for granted, with the main thrust being that it should be collected on behalf of the community.

The LUTA perspective is that our choices about the infrastructure we develop has impacts on the landform quite separate to just how it affects the value of land, though changing the value of land is of course part of the picture.

At a basic level, rail brings the city together and promotes higher density development in a positive way, while roads spread the city out, increasing pollution and reducing civil amenity along the way.

Roads are inherently unable to move large numbers of people around. If the roads are congested, build more roads and more people will use the roads till you have the same level of congestion.

The amount of money available is not the issue. Much money has been available to spend on roads, which would have been better spent on alternate ways of connecting people together.

A summary by Davis, which is approvingly cited by Newman and Kenworthy, two Australian tranpsort researchers, encapsulates an element of this concern :

"..the consequences of decades of market-driven overdevelopment have come true. Decades of systematic under-investment in housing and urban infrastructure, combined with grotesque subsidies for speculators, permissive zoning for commercial development, the absence of effective regional planning and ridiculously low property taxes for the wealthy have ensured an erosion of the quality of life ... city building has otherwise been left to the anarchy of market forces, with only rare interventions by the state, social movements or public leaders."

Certainly, LVT would be useful in reaping the increase in land value resulting from the construction of rail lines & the like, making improvements self funding to a larger degree.

The points are that quite apart from the money so far available, an inappropriate amount has been spent on roads rather than other modes, and that Geonomics looks only at what we do when there has been an increase in the value of land through community input - it ignores factors which would have brought that increase into being, and how there might be broader issues. The problems with the cities might run a lot deeper than just inappropriate land-related taxes.

For this reason, land use-planning-transport issues appear more important than Geonomic issues, which does not deny that Geonomic reforms would be positive.