Comment by jrockway
16 days ago
My experience has been the same. I was on a grand jury, so pre-indictment and no voir dire, and there were many BS cases like this. We returned "no true bill" on all of them, which made me really proud of my randomly-selected neighbors. Cops were trying to railroad so many people over subway fare evasion, upgrading stealing $2.50 from the MTA to felony drug charges. We didn't bite. I did remark that I would just give them the $2.50 rather than ruining some high school student's life. (Seriously, just take it out of my taxes. I'm happy to work to fund public transportation.)
MTA already has a half-price program for low-income people. I agree fare jumpers don't need jail but they need some punishment. Make them clean the station and pick up trash for an hour, right then and there (I'm just spitballing). Otherwise it's unfair to law-abiding people.
I think public transport should be free. That solves the whole problem because it makes no sense to dis-incentivize the use of public transport to begin with and the fares are disproportionally hard on the lowest earners.
Absolutely not. People don’t appreciate free things psychologically. When they don’t appreciate it they trash it: vandalism, littering will all become bigger problems.
To prevent this effect, you have to have a well educated population first. That’s actually an even more difficult problem to solve.
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It's unfortunate, but one problem with free public transport absent other changes is that then it becomes de facto free shelter, which degrades the service for people using it as transport.
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The problem with free public transport is that it turns into a de facto homeless shelter. And then it isn't safe to use anymore. You let people evade fares and then those people go onto stab people like Zarutska.
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It's nice to have an opinion but free public transport causes many issues and isn't great policy, it actually means transport agencies have less money to invest and take out debt on as system use increases which is a very bad position financially. The same issues actually apply to roads as well and are a reason things like congestion taxes are a good idea.
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> it makes no sense to dis-incentivize the use of public transport to begin with
MTA serves NYC. People who can't even afford the subway are definitely not driving over there.
Free public transportation is a huge productivity boost for society.
Great let's pay everyone's fare from your income then.
Free public transport takes away money that can be used to improve service for everyone. Someone on minimum wage would prefer a bus they can actually use to get to work rather than having to buy/maintain a car because the free bus only comes once an hour.
Have targeted low fares for the poor etc.
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Or make the transportation free, then you don't have to worry about policing infractions and instead spend the low effort policing money on cleaning, security, and improvement.
There's an argument that making people pay a fare improves cleanliness and security to an extent. I don't know if there are studies about it. But it's a persuasive argument.
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This is a great way to destroy public transit!
The plan is to let anyone on the subway, with no fares. It turns out that the violent, unstable people who make public spaces unwelcoming are disproportionately represented among those who cannot pay $2.50 for a fare. So they scare off regular transit riders who mode shift to something else. It's vastly more expensive and difficult to react to violence on the subway than to keep violent people out with a small fare, so it's financially and logistically impossible to actually keep it safe. Then your transit ridership tanks and people who hate funding transit can declare the whole thing a giant waste of money and any new funding dies politically because now there's no public ridership constituency left.
Nobody cares about the revenue gained from $2.50 fares. What matters is the tiny amount of resistance that offers to the small number of people who are largely responsible for making public transit unwelcoming.
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Ah, yes, the cost of the price is rarely considered. Think of the money society would save just in not having to pay up for the payment system!
There is too much communism in this sentence.
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Fare jumpers absolutely need jail - the sort of person who jumps the faregate is also much more likely than the average person to be a nuisance or a violent threat to other people on public transit. I think it's more important to jail fare jumpers than a lot of other types of petty criminal, because enclosed public transit is one of the most important areas in a city to control crime; people need to feel safe on public transit in order to want to use it to get around. The sort of person who fare-jumps is extremely often homeless, mentally-ill, or a gang member - not someone who is capable of being compelled to do a minor chore for the station without way more coercive effort than the station employees can be expected to provide. The right response to fare-jumpers is to have police - uniformed specialists in using violence or the threat of violence to enforce public order - physically remove them from the public transit station and keep them in a locked room under guard where they can't harm someone else.
Fined maybe? But jailed is a bit too much. There are poor people who jump the turnstile who are not violent nor a nuisance, why make the assumption that anyone who jumps the turnstile is that bad actor you describe? I jumped the turnstile a few months ago (more like I crawled under in a frenzy like an idiot), I was running late for work, found out my card had to be refilled but there was a line at the machine and the train was approaching the station. Am I a violent criminal? If I got caught it would be fair to fine me but would you jail me?
As far as nuisance and violence on public transportation, that's a different problem that I agree it has to be dealt with. Apparently police don't do anything about it, they instead hunt for fare jumpers...
I pay because fuggit it's cheap but I'm gonna think twice now that I know I can make "those people" think I'm some sort of hardened criminal.
The cop made me call my mom on a pay phone and 40 years later I still have to hear about it. Cruel and unusual.
One made me call my Dad to spite my psycho mother who dragged me tothe Station thinking the cop was gonna scare me straight ratherthen the outcome of him seeing her insanity and pleading with me to stay in contact with the only responsible adult in the room who wouldnt screw me over for the rest of my natura life
It was all very vindicating
Then charge them cleanly and don't artificially try to inflate charges. It is the duty of any jury to let someone off when they feel its malicious prosecution.
Police, Prosecutors, and Judges all openly use their discretion. Each of them could have quashed the charge before it got to a jury. The jury is the last line of discretion. Police, prosecutors, and judges love to call it "jury nullification" but its the same power that police, prosecutors, and judges use multiple times a day.
The only crime I see is that police arrested an innocent person on false evidence, prosecutors charged someone based on false evidence, and a judge is actually allowing this case to proceed all based on evidence that everyone knows is false.
No the punishment should be harsher, not for an hour but 40-60 hours, or fine of $1000-2000. Otherwise they will never learn to respect rules. Especially in the subway where you cannot "accidentally" jump over the turnstile.
I regularly see how people are not paying the bus fare (here in Russia). And the only reason why they do not pay is because the punishment is light (fine of ~25 USD) and chance of being caught and actually prosecuted is close to zero. So paying does not make economical sense.
> Make them clean the station and pick up trash...
This should just be an established way to pay your fare.
"it's unfair to law-abiding people" is a terrible reason to force more people to abide the law if you think the law is unfair
Paying for public transit is not some fundamental violation of human rights.
If you think free public transit should exist, do the policy and outreach work, and make it happen.
Reserve civil disobedience for injustices that truly cannot be tolerated, even for a second. Or when the democratic process is not available to you.
The real crime is you thinking public transportation should cost the individual money.
Nowhere did I say I'm opposed to free public transit. You shouldn't assume things about people.
There should be some teeth, but also we should be prepared for a small amount of "unfairness" baked into the system. If there are no controls, everyone will cheat. But if there's too many obstacles (turnstiles, checkpoints, conductors, cameras, etc) then people won't want to ride.
> If there are no controls, everyone will cheat.
That just isn't true. Not even remotely.
That’s a great idea, just get people to voluntarily sign up to pay for things like that for the criminals. Like you said, take the $2.50 one way several times a day, every day for one person, times however many people do that out of your income since you want to pay for it.
I am no fan of this rotten and illegitimate government or the fake and imitation justice system, but what do you think happens if every thug can just jump fare and get away with it, because if you had $1000 per month taken out of your paycheck every month, in sure you’d be singing a different tune.
Or we can all just agree that maybe basic transit in a city should be subsidized, maybe say... To the same degree that road construction is?
At which point no one would need to pay a fare, and we'd all still save money trying to prosecute broke teenagers trying to move around a city?
Public transit is subsidized in a lot of the world. Subsidized is good. Free though.. free is a problem. A good or service that someone doesn't have to pay for becomes valueless to them, despite it still costing someone (sponsor, owner)/something (corp, gov).
Examples:
A free Christmas party, where the cost of the convention center/catered dinner/wine on the table/entertainment was about $110/pp. Those costs were all paid in advance (you might be able to exceed catering, wine is probably fine but at a different rate.. but otherwise you're stuck with the bill/contract), but when tickets were free the no-show rate ("didn't cost me anything") was about 30%. We switched to $20/ticket, and yes there were grumbles about the company being cheap, but the no-shows fell to around 8%.
There's free sections of transit in our city (not the whole system). Most of the disruption and police call-outs happen in this section.. open drug use, screaming at/threatening other passengers or making them feel unsafe, making a home, thefts & pickpockets (does a thief buy a ticket? Perhaps if they spend 6 hours a day "working" and don't need the hassle of being checked for a ticket), even violent crime (stabbings, beatings, one gun situation). An unfortunate side effect of that is we have one of the worst riderships in part because people don't feel safe on transit, and when discussions of subsidies/improvement/expansion come up ridership is basically the only KPI. ("Oh only 12% of the city uses it, let's not further invest").
Transit is very heavily subsidized by taxes. In the US, the least money losing system is BART which covers 70%+ of it's operating (but not capital) expenses through fares.
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> Seriously, just take it out of my taxes. I'm happy to work to fund public transportation.
Why don’t you just write a check to your transit authority every year then?
In the off chance this is a genuine question, this thought experiment is always resolved with "reasonable payments are only effective if many people contribute, and that is probably okay".
Consider the extremes: - No one does anything. The cause fails. No one goes broke. Many people are modestly inconvenienced. - One average citizen donates everything to a worthy cause. No one else donates. The cause fails and the donor is broke. Many people are modestly inconvenienced. - Everyone donates a small fee to a worthy cause. The cause achieves its aim. Some people do not benefit, and are modestly inconvenienced.
The choice, when given these two extremes, is clearly to decide by some consensus whether the interests of many (who would otherwise be modestly inconvenienced) outweigh the interests of the few (who would be modestly financially inconvenienced).
But it assumes the cause is truly worthy, the money is handled faithfully, and the survey method is fair and accurate.