By now, it is pretty much agreed that the transit system, apart from the small matter of safely moving nearly six million people 365 days a year, is a multistory mess.

Ignoring what lies beneath the daily success is reckless, but endless moaning would be just as bad.

That’s why it was stirring to hear this week that people at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority are pushing an idea that long ago was ripe and ready: harvesting slivers from the city’s tremendous real estate wealth to help pay for the transit system that created it. New York has a long, long history of not doing this — of providing mass transit to real estate owners, making them rich, but not getting anything directly back. It would be as if building owners did not have to pay water charges for the city reservoirs in the mountains and miles of aqueducts that make habitation possible. Mass transit irrigates skyscrapers. It makes density possible.

Yet nearly every expansion of transit since 1940 has been paid for by the riders and the general public. That means close to half the debt service carried by the public is an outright gift to real estate owners along new routes. It has become embedded as an entitlement.

Now, it seems, perhaps for the first time, the M.T.A., including the governor’s appointees, wants to change who will bear the costs for new projects. At a meeting Wednesday where the board approved construction of 10 miles of new track on Long Island, a board member, Carl Weisbrod, argued that some of the cost should be paid by the real estate development the new service will make possible. The urban planners call it “value capture.” The chairman of the M.T.A., Joseph J. Lhota, replied, “All future projects will take that into account.” He said the agency would ask for legislation to make it practical, and Patrick J. Foye, its president, is leading the effort.