Mr. Isaacs lost that argument then, as any of his heirs might today. Michael Horodniceanu, the former director of capital programs for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, raised a version of it in October, proposing that a special tax be collected in the Manhattan business districts heavily served by most of the city’s 27 lines.

Although the wealth-making machinery of the transit system continues to this day, none of the current proposals by the mayor or the governor for funding it touch on property values.

That means the system captures none of the boom created by the new Second Avenue subway line on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Since January, when the line’s 96th Street station opened, a builder has won permission from the City Council for a $950 million development on what had been a somewhat desolate stretch of 96th Street between First and Second Avenues. Just across the street, a 21-story condominium building is rising, one of at least a dozen new residential buildings going up around the three stops on the new line.

The public paid for the new subway construction at a cost now put at $4.4 billion. In Brooklyn, more than $300 million in signaling improvements — and more than $1 billion in cars with new technology to use it — have allowed the L train to nearly double the number of passengers it carries. That, in turn, helped transform Williamsburg, Bushwick, and other working-poor neighborhoods along the line into prime and pricey real estate.

In 1987, the total market value of property in New York was $243 billion, the Independent Budget Office estimates. Three decades later, having grown four times faster than inflation, it is $1.6 trillion.