Ultimately, govt owns all land, and we pay taxes for our use of whatever we have title to. But the comforting delusion of ownership is universally defended.

You also have to factor mobility into the equation. If I own property that I'm using for a special purpose (let's use an extreme example of a hazardous chemical disposal company), and I'm told to relocate for the "market price" of my property, then I'm stuck paying tons of money and dealing with regulatory hell in whatever I choose as my new jurisdiction to do this. This would quite literally put me out of business due to the insanely high cost of relocating everything.

Also, you have the legal roadblocks that often come up (this is the more common reason property can't be acquired). For example, the property might be owned by a trust, which was granted it's powers through a will. Since it's a trust, the beneficiaries are unknown. The person who maintains the trust isn't returning your calls. Who do you write the check to? You can't just take it from the trust, it doesn't work that way (for good reason, without getting into specifics). There are ways to go about it, but the legal proceedings can take years. We're actually dealing with this exact problem now trying to expand an intersection in my local town.

Unfortunately, it's not as simple as just buying the land/structure and moving the occupants. More often than not, there's a reason why this is difficult.

1) The owners themselves, by self-declaring asset values for taxation purposes (on pain of having them vulnerable to eminent domain seizure if they under-declare)

2) Independent assessors who do value assessment for property tax purposes already

3) The sellers that granted the owners possession for a certain value

If you want to run a train line through an old-world country, you have to have the power to plough through the straightest path.

What's really not surprising, of course, is that over half of them are in cities built by the British!

Yeah; if by the British you mean actually the Honk-kong government that is the creator of the MTRCL, the company that build the system during 1979 -which helped them to receive a little bit of land- and became a private company in the year 2000.

Most of them weren't created by the British; who creates the rail system is the one that matters, not who "creates the city".

And the fact that so few of them are in America despite being bigger than all the other countries in the list (maybe even combined) and that so many of them are in Asia should help emphasize my point a bit because cultural aspects are also in play

American: Government wants my land to build a subway? Jackpot! I better give it a high valuation to squish as much money from them as I can; they screw my with taxes now I will screw them!.

Asian: The Government wants my land to build the metro system and they even will give me money for it? It's such an honor to be able to serve my community and all our generations to come with my little property.

Even if you accept that principle -- and while it's not unreasonable, I can also see reasonable arguments against it -- where does this policy end?

Let's get an idea of scale here. The entire UK national rail network currently supports approximately 1.5 billion passenger journeys per year. If we make some plausible assumptions about regular commuters, then probably 5-10 million individuals benefit from travelling on the rail network's approximately 10,000 miles of track more than occasionally. In other words, when you're talking about the mobility of millions, you're not really talking about building a small part of transport infrastructure that affects the property of a few unfortunate people, you're talking about building the kind of infrastructure that supports a population of 60+ million and gets built over many decades.

Let's also consider the likely alternatives. Major projects like new rail don't just affect a few square metres of someone's land when they pass through. Again picking on the UK, just because we have lots of conveniently available data about the new HS2 proposal, the government is now safeguarding an area 60m either side of the proposed route (for the first stage) so strongly that you basically can't do anything in that zone in terms of planning permissions. Obviously in terms of noise and potential disruption to local infrastructure and local travel arrangements, the effects of a major high speed rail link go far more than 60m from the track. So this isn't the kind of project where a single person with a 3-bedroom house is going to be throwing the spanner in the works. It's the kind of thing where an entire rural community is probably under pressure, or within cities with dense accommodation, potentially hundreds of residents in a single building, multiplied out by several buildings. The alternatives that avoid these problems don't just put a slight kink in the proposed route, they probably adjust the route over several miles to go around the entire area, or they relocate the routes and stations within the city so the new path isn't so disruptive, and maybe adjust the local transport infrastructure around stations to support this.

So, your idea of the mobility of millions vs a bit of emotional attachment to a house is not really what we're likely to be talking about for any single infrastructure project. What about some numbers on a more realistic scale? Does the convenience of 10,000s of people having a station a little closer to their office in the centre of the city so they can save two minutes of walking to work every day outweigh the inconvenience to 100s or 1,000s of people whose homes must be destroyed to make way or whose communities are split down the middle by the new route? Does saving a minute or two on a cross-country journey lasting hours outweigh destroying an entire community whose rural settlement is in the way? These are the kinds of argument that compulsory purchase/eminent domain really tends to raise, and they aren't nearly as one-sided as your comment about the mobility of millions might suggest.

That example also shows why "millions" is not an understatement.

If the estimates that the Hyperloop would carry in the region of 3,000 passengers (either way) per hour are correct, calling it 10,000s seems reasonable.

Indeed, it seems quite plausible that constructing something like the currently proposed Hyperloop would cause severe disruption to more people than would actually save a little time travelling on it in a year. Over its entire working lifetime, the number of person-hours lost because of construction effects might still heavily outweigh the number of person-hours saved because of marginally reduced journey times.

"the difference between a straight route rather than two curves on it resulting in adding 30 minutes to the traveling of every person that uses that route now, and in the centuries to come"

I didn't give that example because nothing we're talking about for either Hyperloop or the UK-based rail network is anything close to adding 30 minutes to the journey time. You're absurdly exaggerating the effects of rerouting. Maybe if you added numerous deviations to avoid numerous undesirable land conflicts you'd get to that kind of level, but in that case you have to balance it against numerous different sets of people who lose out in all those conflicts as well.

Basically, the idea of claiming large amounts of land where people are living right now to build infrastructure like the Hyperloop is about as blatant an elitist land-grab as I can think of. If it really were severely inconveniencing a handful of people to make life significantly better for millions you might at least have a decent argument, but the real numbers don't appear to be anything like that from any of the Googling I'm doing today.

It was just an example and I was referring to the appropriation problem not specific in this case; but even if you want to stick with this one you can see that the suggestion of the analysis is to build the hiperloop along the freeway; unfortunately many high density cities don't have one already.

Well, some napkin math: The current system travels at 110 km/h and the Hiperloop goes in a low-estimate average of 350 km/h, so it would save at least two thirds of the current time, if each one travels just 20 minutes using the BART system then let's say 190.000 people that would use the Hyperloop (instead of BART) would save 36932 years of time lost in the next 20 years (with assuming no increase in population, which is false), if it takes 10 years to be build and adds 5 minutes to the time of every car passenger (because it doesn't disrupt BART operation) and SF traffic is pretty good (meaning very low), and if SF moves ~270K cars daily[1] and assuming one passenger it would mean 540K people so it would mean 18750 years lost. But one single lifetime is usually longer than 10 years so most of the people losing time now will be part of the people saving time later thanks to the Hyperloop. So even accounting for the time lost -in a rough estimate- people would save half the time they spend now traveling.

Many things I did not even take in account:

- This will not disrupt car because if you can take the Hyperloop and arrive in 15 minutes while you play Angrybirds or use you car but take 30 minutes you would likely choose the former every time (not just sometimes).

- Less Time save lives; if you are bleeding from a gun shoot arriving 10 minutes faster is the difference between life and death so it saved the rest of your lifetime.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit [1]http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/esc/tollbridge/SFOBB/Sfobbfacts.htm...

Even if we had been talking about BART, to build a new system like that today, with around 100 miles of track and dozens of stations in urban/suburban areas, you'd have to buy up huge amounts of formerly residential land if the area was already well-developed. That would inevitably displace many thousands of people who previously lived there, as well as divide and blight the communities that remained. The social and economic costs of forcing a new system like that on a mature city would be staggering, and it would be likely that much of any new system would be built underground to avoid the damage on the surface.