Comment by mediaman
16 days ago
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.
> It's vastly more expensive and difficult to react to violence on the subway than to keep violent people out with a small fare
Are you making a case that a violent person, who ignores the stringent laws of society against violence, will diligently follow the laws of society requiring $2.50 prior to riding public transport?
LOL
It means you can kick out an unstable person who has not paid $2.50 before they become violent.
Why not? Surely you can have defined intervention protocols and standards of care for mental health that don't require violence to initiate. Also, mental health issues is not equivalent to "poor."
I feel like you've argued from a false dichotomy -- we can't do X because of bad things, so we have to put up with Y and bad things.
Your argument is like saying I won't put a basic privacy lock on my gym locker because, you know, a creep wanting to sift through my things is going to do it anyway.
There is a cost benefit analysis that even serial offenders go through to pick a victim. If a transit system insists on fares, it is likely they are watching out for fare dodgers which increases the risk of getting caught even before the offender gets a chance to offend.
> There is a cost benefit analysis that even serial offenders go through to pick a victim
Are you making the case that a society unable to protect its denizens from violent offenders in broader society will be able to protect its denizens on public transport from those same violent offenders through the application of a $2.50 fare?
Hmm.
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