- cross-posted to:
- conservative@lemm.ee
- politics@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- conservative@lemm.ee
- politics@lemmy.world
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Citations Needed did an episode about this. “Fare evasion” crackdown is a bullshit excuse to beef up cops and redirect public attention
I feel like you can make that case about sooo many ‘crackdowns’ because of the way crime statistics and reporting is done in America. But if that was true we’d eventually have declining violence rates in the face of over militarized police where the media focuses on spectacles of violence to justify the spendings. Good thing thats not what’s happening right now /s.
I love the ticket systems in places like Berlin, Helsinki, Heidelberg, and Tampere. They don’t use turnstiles at all, just occasional onboard ticket checkers.
It’s so much faster for large groups of people to move through the stations so it keeps people moving instead of piling up at a ticket machine, even ones as fast as those in London.
You don’t need officers standing guard at turnstiles, just extra onboard sweeps to keep most people honest.
Even better is a whole free system like some cities are going to. LA is having a freeway widening project happening. If the money for that went to their public transit system, they could make it fare free for 20 years at the same price point as “just one more lane, bro” of freeway that will still be a parking lot anyway.
A better reason to make all these free is that they are largely funded by taxes in the first place.
71% for the MTA in NY.
https://cbcny.org/research/how-much-do-city-taxpayers-really-contribute-mta
Save money by getting rid of the ticket infrastructure and enforcement and encourage use.
The problem with this approach is that the NYC subway cars in Manhattan and the surrounding areas are usually packed like to the point where you can’t even move. Also, so many people get on and off so quickly that it would be difficult to keep track of people.
LA does have turnstile-free trains though.
Nice! I haven’t had the opportunity to visit their system yet.
I was right near a station when I lived in North Hollywood, so we took the train constantly. I wish there was a train to the beach when I lived in L.A. because that was one of the big letdowns about the train system, but there is now! I don’t remember how much a ticket cost, but it was pretty affordable.
I wish the UK would go to the German system. Particularly the 50EUR/m unlimited slow train travel, that’s goddamned amazing.
I’d consider getting rid of my car if we had that here.People in LA don’t want a free system. Unfortunately we have a lot of problems that free covid fares exacerbated.
People in LA don’t want a free system.
-snort-
They must not be human. /s
Unfortunately we have a lot of problems that free covid fares exacerbated.
Commuting issues have been a problem in LA for decades before Covid existed. The Metrolink/subway system has existed since before Covid.
I don’t know what any of these responses is supposed to mean.
Since they ended the Covid free fare policy, the metro has been much much nicer and ridership has gone up as a result.
Since they ended the Covid free fare policy, the metro has been much much nicer and ridership has gone up as a result.
Could you elaborate on what the Covid-era problems were?
Metro was plagued with safety issues, open drug use and overdoses and deaths, and cars becoming permanent homeless housing.
I live in LA car free, and ridership has been rising a lot lately.
Same in Oslo. No turnstiles, you are just expected to have a valid ticket, (mainly digital) within the zone. And you can get checked at any time
Another star for Norway. If I could get family issues disentangled, I’d be applying for jobs there in a heartbeat.
Most of Sweden does it that way too
What do they do if you are caught without a ticket?
You get IDd and a fine.
You can either pay it there or get it mailed, but then it’s like 20% more expensive
Other than London, is there any European city with turnstiles? I’ve been traveling extensively and never noticed any.
The Netherlands recently switched to turnstyles.
Stockholms has automatic gates that open once your ticket gets scanned. So basically the same function?
Paris for the metro/rer.
The big lines/intercity often have no one checking at the entrance, but do fairly regular ticket checks once on board.
Stockholm at least has them.
Lisbon has them, and I believe so does Porto (the only two portuguese cities with subway)
Even better is a whole free system like some cities are going to. LA is having a freeway widening project happening. If the money for that went to their public transit system, they could make it fare free for 20 years at the same price point as “just one more lane, bro” of freeway that will still be a parking lot anyway.
Actually the Metrolink trains that run to/from LA to/from the other nearby counties/suburban areas all work the same way, no turnstiles, just conductors checking for tickets on them.
Some local community cities even subsidize the monthly fees for the Metrolink trains.
And once the Metrolink trains get to downtown LA’s Union Station you take the subway to different areas (yes, LA does have a subway system as well).
That’s all great. I have been hearing about the LA transit build out for a while and I’m excited to see more investment for the region. It’s one of the largest metro regions in the world and deserves to have one of the best public transit systems to go with that.
If they could just get that Vegas high speed rail line to actually reach into downtown instead of stopping 40 miles out, it would be a serious upgrade to the Intercity efforts.
If they could just get that Vegas high speed rail line to actually reach into downtown instead of stopping 40 miles out, it would be a serious upgrade to the Intercity efforts.
Well, people don’t commute from Los Angeles to Las Vegas to work daily, which is what I understand this conversation is about, commuters paying their fares (or not).
Having said that, I totally agree with you.
You’d think that’d be a no-brainer, but I’m sure there’s probably legal reasons for it, or fighting the legal reasons so it’s costs reasons.
Maybe it’s just they don’t want to have the regional airports lose money from the lost fares to Vegas. /shrug
It’s going to be about cost of construction. You can build a lot of miles across the desert for the same price as a mile in the city. Getting all the way into the core of one of these expensive real estate markets in the world can’t be cheap. I hope they manage to make it happen at some point, though.
I can also assume the regional airports are also not overly pleased with the HSR build out too, but reducing car trips and plane flights is basically the core goal of the train.
Berliner here. That’s not better at all. It makes it much easier to forget to validate the ticket, and the people who control are usually assholes.
IDK about that, have you ever been handcuffed and arrested by an armed uniformed police officer because you didn’t spend $3? Lots of people in NYC have. The transit system in Berlin sounds similar to the one we have where I live (not NYC). Here, you can get a fine (a couple hundred dollars iirc) and kicked off the train, but that’s it. Not pleasant, certainly enough to keep me honest, but a damn sight better than having a police record and maybe getting shot by a cop.
The thing I hated about the Munich system was having to validate your ticket. My girlfriend and her friends got harassed and threatened by a cop because they didn’t know they had to validate the tickets they bought.
That’s a job requirement.
Dunno how it works there, as I’ve never used public transport there, but here in Tampere we have ticket readers right next to tram doors and everyone taps their card / mobile on those to activate the ticket. Not easy to forget at all. Same in local trains.
London can take tens of minutes to get a ticket in peak times. Not a problem for most commuters, but for tourists and random travellers it sucks
Why would you get a ticket for the tube/bus/overground? You can now pay with any contactless card or apple/android pay.
The tube is fine, it’s the inter city rail that sucks
Can’t argue there, but I do recommend a train ticket app for e-tickets
I know someone that grew up in LA. Their childhood home was demolished and turned into an extra lane for the freeway.
This guy Finlands. Two of those cities are the same country haha. Toriiii 🇫🇮
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That’s nothing. Trump never paid taxes for a decade on millions of dollars of income and property. No one bothered to catch him until it was convenient to not get a psycho president again.
If I spent $150m in my private sector job and did not at least net in the positive, I’d be out right shit canned and black listed from the company, along with everyone who approved such a waste.
Is farebeater what we’re calling it now?
Tbf I can do that without leaving my house.
It’s not about the fares, it’s about the control.
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I know it can be difficult to search for answers when you have questions. I did a deep dive into the subject matter, and found the following info hidden within the first sentence:
Overtime pay for cops in New York’s subway system increased from $4 million in 2022 to $155 million over the same period in 2023, according to an analysis by Gothamist.
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Dude just be wrong
Jesus, someone call the burn unit
No point, they might as well of been thrown into the sun.
have been
Thank you teacher.
You’re welcome Daniel-san.
Thankfully there are a lot of grifters so at least we hope corruption reduced their arsenal
I know this is a Captain Obvious moment but I’ll bite anyway, just imagine how great it would be if we just socialized public transit and our tax dollars worked for us, instead of trying to incarcerate us.
I was going to say it is a socialized transit program, but apparently the NYC MTA is a “public benefit corporation,” aka the bog standard neoliberal privatization fetish that oh-so-accidentally serves to funnel wealth to the C levels and boards.
What sort of country would it be if the police wasn’t trying to ruin anyone’s life on a daily basis?
That’s why income-based fines should be done.
Lmao, because millionaires are the target demographic fare evading.
Can you explain what you’re trying to say here? I don’t think I understand clearly.
He’s saying the rich don’t ride the subway and if they do, they buy a ticket. So a wage based scaling infringement system would be borderline useless, because you’d likely be issuing a lot of fines to the homeless and working class
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/04/wealthy-people-shoplift-rob-steal-why
Rich people steal more than poor people. Not even getting into things like wage theft, they just do, so yes, they absolutely would jump a turnstile and laugh when you tried to punish them with a non-income based fine.
If you own a house but can barely afford it, this is how you become homeless. Ofcourse, a new body would come into the story to purchase your home from the bank after it reposese it.
This sounds like the NYPD working like the Mafia, no work and no show jobs, taking jobs that they know they’re not gonna do or investigate. They’re stealing from the city to make their officers and departments richer.
You get your car stolen, or robbed and you can’t find a cop to even pretend they give a shit. But they’re happy to take $150 million off our ass.
You’re dead on. NYPD is entirely useless. I’ve had to call them before due to violent fights outside my door, they called back 3 hours later asking if the fight was still happening.
Yeah. Not just NY, either. About a decade back where I live we called the cops about a curb-stomping we witnessed living across the street from the local bar. We had our radio on. Here was the timeline.
- We call and report it
- Bouncer comes outside of the bar and says “I just got a call there’s a fight going on. You guys gotta break it up; the cops are coming”
- Wait 5 minutes, as the victim gets told to leave and “go clean up” and the attacker walks back into the bar.
- Dispatch (who has been quiet) reports on radio that somebody reported a fight in front of that bar
- Wait 5 more minutes (did I mention the station is about 0.5 miles from this bar? In a small town with no traffic?)
- One officer shows up, looks around without asking anyone anything
- Radio back to dispatch “no fight here”
The end. We identified ourselves in our report, the officer declined to visit and question us. There were at least 5 eyewitnesses, and we live in a town that they’d probably talk… but nope.
bruh they think it like a DBZ fight or something 💀
“Yeah officer they’re still there and they’ve been monologing for two episodes, come now, they’re distracted.”
“Come quickly before he remembers the good memories he made with his friends and get a power up!”
Brooooo, super off topic but seeing you name and profile pic got me fired up, I love ocelots.
Isn’t it absolutely asinine that new york voters literally elected a fuckin cop from the NYPD, which is well-known as being one of the most corrupt and racist police departments in the nation?
I honestly couldn’t believe it even after all the 2020 protests against American law enforcement.
Mass transit should be free if they have ads on it
Mass transit should be free and not have ads on it.
In fact, all advertising in public spaces (including things like billboards mounted on private property but aimed towards the street) should be prohibited.
For the public and environment policy that mass transit is made for (freeing up parking space; removing polluting cars from the road; reducing congestion; reducing carbon burn) yeah. Mass transit should have no usage cost
I’ll accept public service adverts. Telling you about services, advertising health and well-being, telling you to keep your feet off the seats
If I were “dictator for a day” one of the odd things I would do is ban all billboards. I think this every time I drive down the highway.
Many cities have taken baby steps, such as prohibiting tall signs. More steps to go
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In Washington State, it’s relatively difficult to have billboards along highways. It’s one of the reasons our state is still beautiful to travel across.
Every time I end up in other states that have much looser billboard placement laws it’s just awful and I wonder how people can live like that.
Maine is a billboard-free state
At least last I was there, wholly illegal in Vermont. You also never see it in Norway.
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McDonalds should show ads instead of charging me for a burger
My city’s transit is already being treated like a homeless shelter, so having free transit would be amazing but a disaster.
Transit should be free and the money spent implementing the fare-collection system should be spent on housing the homeless instead.
edit sorry I have feelings about this lol, I didn’t mean to send all this energy at you, more like I needed to howl into the void
This is such an enraging narrative and I encounter it all the time. My city has lots of homeless because the climate is temperate (and for other reasons but not the point of this post). My city also has free bus transit (no fares no nothing).
People ALL the time hem and haw to me about being concerned if we have free transit it will be “overrun” by homeless. Often it is people I am talking to about mass transit living in my own city who have zero clue we have even have free bus transit.
At the end of the day if you are “concerned about the homeless” using the bus too much or something you know the best solution? Use the damn bus, not only will you actually see with your own eyes that homeless are just using the bus like everybody else, you help push the needle of what the average bus user looks towards you and away from whoever you are imagining as bad.
Free mass transit is the foundation of the best cities in the past and future, hamstringing transit because of a fear of homeless “ruining” it is the definition of shooting ourselves in the foot for no reason.
Yes I see homeless on the bus a lot, I see lots of people on the bus. There tends to be a lot of humans on the bus.
I use the bus daily. And mentally ill homeless walking around pointing their finger at your kid and saying “bang!” Or telling your wife “I wanna touch you!” Is not ok. Those are the ones I’m talking about. The ones that make their issues into everyone else’s. When you start threatening my family, my sympathy for your situation and mental health vanishes
I have rarely if ever encountered homeless like that. Sure it makes sense to get upset about that, but a lot of people’s perception is that every single homeless person is like that.
So, give them homes. Tiny homes are cheap and for most homeless people not having a house or address is the number one reason they can’t get a house or address. The others need to be in a care facility. It should take a true renegade to remain homeless. But we value profits over everything else.
The biggest homeless issue in my city isn’t with the homeless who want help, it’s with the mentally ill ones who don’t want help or are too sick to ask. There’s really no way to deal with that tier of homeless unless you do it by force, which most anti homelessness activists are against.
They’re against the old school mental institutions that abused people. They very much advocate for concentrating services and shelters so homeless people aren’t trying to get all over the city for that stuff. Psychologists and Pharmacies would absolutely be included in those services.
Is the ad revenue on mass transit actually high enough to support its operation?(ignoring even maintenance or expansion, or the replacement of unrepairable vehicles)
It varies. Usually fares are just there to ration use of the mass transit, providing less than a third of its cost (ignoring capital)
Also: why would you ration transit? You want as many people as possible to use it
No one’s so cheap they cycle instead. Those who cycle do so for health. We could free up there roads for the die hard drivers
For bus systems at least the amount fares cover is typically on the order of 5% give or take in the US. The fact that bus fares exist at this point in the US has got everything to do with emotions, narratives and a political stance against providing a social safety net and nothing to do with cold hard economics.
It’s not, and I don’t even need to go look it up.
Operating a subway is expensive. Maintenance, new lines, new trains, you name it, it costs shitloads
Operating a subway is expensive only when you don’t compare it to operating a city on cars shrugs
Yes exactly this. Car infrastructure is the most expensive transportation infrastructure per capita possible. It’s why the US spends tons of public money on transportation and has just crumbling highways to show for it.
Might also be because of how massive the US is with relatively big distances between big cities
Most commutes are not between major cities, they are within metro regions, so the size of the US doesn’t explain the terrible infrastructure. Besides, for decades now, most of Europe has no political impediments to travel, same as the US. People can commute from Berlin to Madrid as if it were one country. Density matters, but not the size of the country.
As for density, there are many US regions that are of similar density and distance apart as European cities, such as DC-NY-Boston, or Portland-Seattle-Vancouver, SF-LA, etc.
It’s so expensive that the NYC subway used to be multiple private railroad companies but the business just wasn’t feasible (at a reasonable price) when the market had a downturn - which is why the city eventually took it over.
This is why the track geographies are so odd in NYC
I don’t care. I just hate ads.
The fares themselves usually account for a tiny portion of the overall revenue. For example, in 2021 the MTA had $7.8 Billion in revenue. And they are fighting for $100k of lost fares
Yeah, police are a service, not a cost of goods sold. It’s supposed to cost money, it’s not supposed to pay for itself.
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But is it supposed to waste money?
Very true but there is a line my man. If they had blown that much money going after serious criminals? Sure. But 150 fucking million to track down and catch what is essentially half a step above shoplifters?
Half step below, I’d say. Shoplifting is a more serious infraction (not that I care) because they’re taking physical items.
This is just a small fraction of the cost of upkeep and maintenance and is intangible.
You might be right, and I’m not one to suggest we ought to spend more on police when an equivalent crime reduction could be the result of spending the money on social services.
All I’m saying is that you cannot measure its success or failures by comparing the cost to one type of arrest. The article mentioned a 2% reduction in major crimes, and while we can’t really know if that’s caused by theincreased spending, if one rape or one murder was stopped as a result of increased police presence or increased overtime, then what is that one crime worth?
But did they stop any of those things while on toll duty? I think someone should have gathered information like that before parading out a cost sink this big, that on the surface, has the look that they just pulled off the perfect in plan site crime of stealing NY tax dollars to punish a few people that for whatever reason didn’t pay the toll.
If you could instead point to a chart that stated, while we had officers stationed watching for toll dodgers we caught X amount of people trying to rob people, or stopped X amount of potential rapes I could see the benefit. But tooting your own horn without any of that, over what looks like robbing the NY citizens of millions of taxes dollars should have the attorney general bringing charges.
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The most successful drug smuggler in the USA
The same thing is true for public transit! We shouldn’t even be trying to charge for it in the first place, let alone spend money policing fare evasion.
I agree with you and I really do not like modern policing at all. Just like the post office we shouldn’t evaluate it simply on the most discrete of monetary accounting. However in this case I prsonally feel like the response was disproportionate in both money and execution wise comapred to even the desired goal, which takes a little longer to say but has a teeny bit of nuance to it.
The downvotes you’re getting are wild to me, I feel like everything you said was objectively true, and without personal opinion even. If someone has an issue with what the police are doing here it’s not hard to look further than the money in vs. money out equation, and it is lazy to lean on only that financial argument.
And this is why Seattle mostly ignores people who skip out on fares.
The Capital Hill train is totally useless, but I love that I’ve never paid for it, so… Win win?
Capitol Hill train? Do you mean the light rail, which visits many neighborhoods and even other cities?
